Media literacy is touted as a necessary life skill for cultural citizenship, yet as it is generally practiced there is little engagement with sustainability issues. In order to gain insights into why this is the case, this research investigated how media literacy practitioners use metaphors to frame both the role of media education in the world…

The given article intends to focus on some approaches to teaching English as a second language at an advanced or proficient level. The paper primarily deals with the ways in which stylistic aspect of newspaper language can be put to use by university students thus becoming an integral part of their classroom discourse. The study aims at presenting…

In the first case study, a piece of recent BBC news reported on Chinese netizens leaving random but funny comments on a Western website attracted people's attention. A closer look at those comments reveals that understanding the Chinese netizens' comments requires metaphorical and cultural knowledge. This study starts with theoretical explanations…

Teacher educators have a very daunting task requiring currency in their discipline, curricular, policy and institutional imperatives as well as pedagogical and cultural issues. Tertiary institutions are facing increasing expectations to cater for and increase retention of underrepresented groups, whilst class sizes increase and face-to-face…

This study leads the reader on a learning journey with the heroic metaphors derived from heroic myths of today's pop culture to the views shared by aspiring administrators. Viewing the students' leadership vision of self as hero provided insight to guiding students in their personal leadership journey. By naming and describing self as hero, future…

Scientific discourse is characterized by multi-semiotic construction and the resultant semantic expansions. To date, there remains a lack of analytical methods to explicate the multiplicative nature of meaning. Drawing on the theories of systemic functional linguistics, this article examines the meaning-making processes across language and…

The use of sarcasm sometimes lessens and sometimes enhances the negativity inherent in a sarcastic statement. Using a realistic conversational format, participants read either a sarcastic or a non-sarcastic aggressive argument between same-gendered interlocutors, and rated the pragmatic goals being expressed using a range of measures taken from…

This study investigated the effect of the title and ambiguity tolerance on the comprehensibility of a non-text. To this end, ten irrelevant sentences from different texts were put together to make two seemingly cohesive and coherent texts. The two texts were exactly the same except for the fact that one of them carried a title whereas the other…

The notions of user involvement and user orientation have become popular catchphrases in innovation research and practice. Central in this research are the ideas that knowledge about users leads to better design, and that the interests of users and producers need to be aligned. In another field of research, scholars have long recognised the…

The predominance of the left hemisphere in language comprehension and production is well established. More recently, the right hemisphere's contribution to language has been examined. Clinical, behavioral, and neuroimaging research support the right hemisphere's involvement in metaphor processing. But, there is disagreement about whether…

This essay explores Barack Obama's invocation of the Exodus during his 2008 presidential campaign. It argues Obama's turn to Exodus, his rare embodiment of Joshua, and his renewal of the American covenant nicely addressed major rhetorical problems that he faced. Of equal importance, his campaign oratory opens an important line of inquiry into the…

A number of studies claim that knowledge of 5,000-8,000 of the most frequent words should provide at least 95% coverage of most unsimplified texts in English, arguably enough to guess or ignore most unknown words while reading (Hirsh & Nation, 1992; Hu & Nation, 2000; Laufer, 1991; Nation, 2006). However, perhaps hidden in that 95% figure…

The idea that learning involves a kind of therapy goes back to ancient times: Socrates was, at least in part, concerned with a kind of care of the self, and Plato in his early dialogues presents learning as a cure for bad intellectual and moral habits. Our metaphoric use of therapy supposes that worthwhile learning might be considered as a…

In this paper we consider the significant issue of identity and how it relates to learning. Importantly, we narrow down the study in terms of how projective identity interplays with learning from the point of view of the learner and his/her social community. Self and community cannot be divorced. In order to illustrate this concept, we describe a…

In this article, the author discusses social justice as a "pedagogy of edge." She argues that educators hold the privilege to begin reframing the dialogue on social justice as a relation of all subjects and to dredge from within the meanings drawn and practices made in honor of justice. This may require a shift away from social justice as a…