The author examines the discourses and practices of two Black women educators regarding the spiritual education of their daughters. Their daughters attended an independent African-centered community school in a large Midwestern city. Semi-structured interviews were conducted as part of a larger ethnographic study exploring the education of Black…

Prior research on small-group collaboration identifies several behaviors that significantly predict student learning, such as exchanging explanations and applying help received. Previous reports focus on student behavior to understand why many students do not engage in behaviors predictive of learning, leaving unexplored how teachers may influence…

Given the current popularity of ethnographic methods of researching teaching and teachers, many investigators commonly confront the task of analyzing interview transcripts in order to uncover speakers' meaning systems and the embedded perspectives on knowledge and practice upon which those meaning systems rely. Others have written about conducting…

A key to improving urban science and mathematics education is to facilitate the mutual understanding of the participants involved and then look for strategies to bridge differences. Educators need new theoretical tools to do so. In this paper the argument is made that the concept of "boundary spanner" is such a tool. Boundary spanners…

The following discourse seeks to characterize and to outline research from the field of Special Education. The research tradition in this field is ample, both at theoretical and especially practical levels, but unbalanced in terms of research and meta-research. Such an imbalance can be attributed to (among other possibilities) the lack of…

The present article examines one property of bilingual speech--convergence--and strives towards explanatory depth by attending to the insights of the antecedent research in formal linguistics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. In particular, the paper adopts as a point of departure (and further substantiates) the argument that convergence…

Initiation, response and follow-up (IRF) exchanges produced by a student and his tutor in an internet-based tutorial interaction have been analysed in terms of the multifunctional characteristics of each utterance. Different functions, related to different purposes, were observed in the IRF moves performed by the student. The control over the…

This article draws on the understanding of the lives and experiences of two Somali women, as case studies, to examine the relationship between identity, work and language learning. It begins with a brief discussion of embodied knowledge, with a view to exploring how "know how" intersects with literacy and identity. The article then moves…

Research articles and research theses constitute two key genres used by scientific communities for the dissemination and ratification of knowledge. Both genres are produced at advanced stages of individuals' enculturation in disciplinary communities present original research aim to persuade the academic community to accept new knowledge claims,…

To what extent have postmodernism and research modalities which fundamentally question the notion of the objective researcher impacted on the production of Ph.D. theses in the humanities and social sciences? This paper examines the visual and verbal representations of the writerly self through the title pages, tables of contents and introductory…

For airline pilots, the call of "checklist complete" is officially prescribed talk to claim that the crew's joint conduct of a checklist is over, and the task can be understood as closed. However, very often this call is not the final talk for the task. This paper uses naturally occurring data, transcriptions of pilots interacting on actual…

In the academic ranks of schooling, writing tasks move gradually from a focus on the transmission of knowledge to the transformation of knowledge. As a more complex writing task, knowledge-transforming requires writers to engage in the rhetorical act of persuading readers of their work's value, significance, and credibility. At the graduate level,…

Limitations in communication modality and interactivity influence the use of language in an online environment, and conversely, language may be adapted to compensate for the online constraints. This is significant for participants in online learning environments (OLEs) who rely on written verbalization to achieve their educational objectives.…

One fruitful line of research has been to explore the local linguistic as well as global rhetorical patterns of particular genres in order to identify their recognizable structural identity, or what Bhatia (1999: 22) calls "generic integrity". In terms of methodology, to date most genre-based studies have employed one or the other of Swales'…

This paper presents empirical results from an analysis of English and German conversational fillers produced by bilinguals. They reveal that even accomplished bilinguals do not display an overall native-like realization of conversational fillers in their second language (L2). Along with the findings of L2 studies showing that the comprehension and…