This qualitative study builds on earlier research on language and identity by focusing on how Canadian Generation 1.5 university students enact their identities through talk-in-interaction. Drawing on (applied) Conversational Analysis (CA) to analyze critically the production and management of social institutions in talk-in-interaction in tandem…

In this study, we take a sociocultural perspective on teaching and learning to examine how teachers in an urban Algebra 1 classroom constructed opportunities to learn. Drawing on analyses of discourse practices, including videotaped classroom lessons as well as other classroom artifacts and telephone interviews, we describe ways that two teachers…

Learning and dialogue may naturally engender feelings and expressions of uncertainty for a variety of reasons and purposes. Yet, little research has examined how patterns of linguistic uncertainty are enacted and changed over time as students reciprocally influence one another and the dialogical system they are creating. This study describes the…

This study examines aspects of the syntax-discourse interface in near-native French. Two cleft structures--"c'est" clefts and "avoir" clefts--are examined in experimental and spontaneous conversational data from 10 adult Anglophone learners of French and ten native speakers of French. "C'est" clefts mark focus, and…

This study explores complex language in adolescents with specific language impairment (SLI) with the aim of finding out how aspects of language characteristic of typical syntactic development after childhood fare and, in particular, whether there is evidence that individuals with SLI avoid using structures whose syntactic derivation involves…

The discursive practices of adoptive parents in two online transnational adoption forums (2006-2008) and observations of five international adoption workshops suggest that what Heather Jacobson described as "culture keeping", the cultural socialization of children that retains a sense of native group identity, is more aptly characterized as…

This paper provides a critical analysis of the Australian government's education revolution policy as promulgated in the media release document, "Quality Education: The Case for an Education Revolution in our Schools". It seeks to problematize the government's claim to marry quality and equity, via an analysis of the discursive…

If mathematics is a male domain, where does this leave women who do mathematics? In a world where there is little or no discursive space in which to be female, women who enter in must do identity work in order to achieve what is often an uneasy presence. This paper builds on recent research which suggests that some undergraduate women are however…

Focusing on matters of power and difference, this article examines rhetorical theories of genre and James Gee's theory of Discourse. Although both theories offer productive ways of understanding literate practice, it is argued, they are limited in crucial respects. Genre theory offers few ways of understanding how and why some social actors have…

This article contributes to a social psychological understanding of identity by identifying some features of the interactional organization of self-praise. Early conversation analytic work on the epistemics of self-assessment and constraints against self-praise has shown that praising oneself is an interactionally delicate matter that may leave…

If for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the "Battle of the Teutoburg Forest", fought in 9 CE between Roman armies and Germanic tribes, was predominantly a reference point for nationalist and chauvinist discourses in Germany, the first decade of the twenty-first century has seen attempts to link public remembrance with…

Toddlers who are "late talkers" demonstrate reduced expressive vocabulary in the absence of physical, social, cognitive, or sensory impairment; they are usually identified at age 2, when they produce fewer than 50 words and do not combine words (Rescorla, 1989). This study analyzed spontaneous language samples of 10 late talking toddlers and 11…

This paper presents a study of pulmonic ingressive speech, a severely understudied phenomenon within varieties of English. While ingressive speech has been reported for several parts of the British Isles, New England, and eastern Canada, thus far Newfoundland appears to be the only locality where researchers have managed to provide substantial…

This paper analyses the linguistic construction of the televisual character Sheldon--the "main nerd" in the sitcom "The Big Bang Theory" (CBS, 2007-), approaching this construction of character through both computerised and "manual" linguistic analysis. More specifically, a computer analysis of dialogue (using concordances and keyword analysis) in…

When communicating with their interlocutors, adults have a robust preference to order previously mentioned ("old") referents in the discourse before mentioning referents that have not yet been introduced in the discourse ("new"). But in an experimental study investigating phrasal conjuncts, 3- to 5-year-olds acquiring German…