This authentic threat asserts impending fatal injury. Because of the dangerous nature of threats, investigators must immediately ask: Is the intent real? Is the threatener likely to act? With real lives at risk, using the linguistic information available to answer these questions quickly and accurately is of great importance. Yet, because most…

Background: An important element in the experiences of people with autism is the key role played by therapeutic interventions. This paper examines the role of therapeutic intervention and the construction of individuals with autism in the therapeutic relationship. Method: The contributions to four online asynchronous discussion lists were analysed…

As cities like "Portstown" comply with statutory mandates to involve citizens in the drafting of their comprehensive plans, community-literacy workers should pay careful attention to the reading and writing opportunities that emerge. This case-study examines how Portstown planners surveyed citizens' experience of their city and…

This article explores the praxis that informs higher education, and how students with special educational needs make sense of their experiences concerning higher education. The discourse that this article challenges is oppression, inequalities, exclusion and marginalization of students with SEN. This article also creates a forum of amplification…

This study analyzes the extent to which students using web-based discussion boards show an increase in perspective-taking in structured and unstructured discussions. Messages from fifty-six students enrolled in one of two courses were content analyzed using Jarvela and Hakkinen's (2003) expansion of Selman's (1980) perspective-taking coding…

The aim of this paper is to analyze how fathers position themselves within their everyday discursive practices at home. We consider the shift from a traditional father figure, defined and perceived as a provider, to an emerging collaborative one in order to explore the discursive acts of fathers' positioning through the observation of the everyday…

This article addresses recent approaches to uncovering and theorizing the design activities that occur in online gaming affinity spaces. Examples are presented of productive d/Discourse present within online forums around three video game series, video games, or game platforms, and key design practices engaged upon by gamers in these spaces. It is…

Repair practices used by teachers who work with children with specific speech and language difficulties (SSLDs) have hitherto remained largely unexplored. Such classrooms therefore offer a new context for researching repairs and considering how they compare with non-SSLD interactions. Repair trajectories are of interest because they are dialogic…

This article closely examines the bilingual talk emerging from informal discussions among young people attending a bilingual school in Wales. In contrast to the common focus on issues of bilinguals' linguistic competence in the literature, this paper advocates a speaker's perspective and considers bilingualism to be the sedimentation of social and…

This article discusses the quantitative analysis of verbal expressions of comments from the evaluation committee reviewers for 8 years (FY2001-FY2008) at the Japanese Public Research Institute, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). First, the terms often appearing in the comment sheets were observed. Moreover,…

Three data sets of primary and secondary interjections were compared: (1) the original interjections written into the text of Jane Austen's (1813/1994) novel "Pride and prejudice"; (2) the interjections read aloud in commercial recordings by six professional readers of the entire text of the novel; (3) the interjections spoken by actresses and…

This paper examines the representation of ethnic minorities in China through a review of campus newspapers, a major print medium in which universities exercise power over the discourse of cultural recognition. Three universities attended by minority students were selected. A two-dimensional mode (content and configuration) is established to…

Taking a sociocultural perspective, this study addresses the interface between language learners and novel communities of practice. The study combines the social learning theory of communities of practice with social constructivist treatments of nation-states as imagined communities in order to consider "imagined national communities of…

During the 15 years that "Quality in Higher Education" has held a focal position in the field of higher education assessment, the concept of quality has evolved from a debatable and controversial concept to an everyday matter in higher education. The author takes a personal look into the development of the field by first tracking the discursive…

Singapore English has been, and still is, an enigma for many scholars and researchers. In recent years, much attention has been given to the analysis of its particles. However, rather than focusing on the analysis of one particle or several particles and how they operate at the level of the sentence, this paper looks at a particular phenomenon in…