The present paper examines male and female teachers' language practices in relation to "censuring" talk in the primary classroom, in the context of the debate around boys' "underachievement" and the "feminisation" of primary school culture. Through an analysis of classroom observations with 51 men and women teachers, it looks to see whether gender…

The acquisition of reference involves both morphosyntax and pragmatics. This study investigates whether Dutch, English and French two- to three-year-old children differentiate in their use of determiners between non-specific/specific reference, newness/givenness in discourse and mutual/no mutual knowledge between interlocutors. A brief analysis of…

This paper investigates the differences in the discursive patterning of cases in Law and Management. It examines a corpus of 271 Law and Management cases and discusses the kind of information that these two disciplines call for and how discourses are constructed in discursive hierarchical patterns. A discursive hierarchical pattern is a model…

Conflict and miscommunication between English as a Second Language (ESL) parents and teachers has had a major impact on educational policy, but few empirical studies examine it as discourse. This study examines communication between ESL parents and high school ESL teachers in a "Parents' Night" (PN) event organised to increase understanding of the…

This article aims to demonstrate how the use of an online journal, a bilingual blog, can contribute to filling in the language and cultural gaps of foreign language learners. This case study focuses on the participation, interaction, motivation, language acquisition, feedback and cultural input improved by students of Spanish as a Foreign Language…

Contemporary research suggests that forming a professional identity is crucial to the process of becoming a teacher. Furthermore, a "narrative turn" has emerged as a major methodological influence for the study of identity in research on teaching. A guiding assumption of traditional narrative research is that stories act as…

Comparisons were made of the class discussions from two graduate courses related to infants with disabilities and home visiting practice. Students were enrolled in either a traditional on-campus course that met weekly or an online course that engaged students asynchronously. Both groups of students also made weekly home visits to a family with an…

This paper is drawn from a longitudinal case study in which the authors have tracked the progress of 20 Social Science students over the course of their undergraduate degrees at a historically "white" South African university. The students are all from disadvantaged educational backgrounds and/or speakers of English as a second language.…

In this article, the authors present parent-educator conversations, which were selected to illustrate common communication patterns and provide links to some of the Division for Early Childhood of the Council for Exceptional Children's recommended practices for communicating and collaborating with parents. Using conversation analysis, researchers…

An outline of frameworks for conceptualising and analysing news media roles in the representation of teachers, is followed by a discussion of quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of news coverage. An argument is made for the benefit of using corpus linguistic tools within the overall conceptual focus on lexical and syntactical…

Richard Peters argued for a general education based largely on the study of truth-seeking subjects for its own sake. His arguments have long been acknowledged as problematic. There are also difficulties with Paul Hirst's arguments for a liberal education, which in part overlap with Peters'. Where justification fails, can historical explanation…

I explore the relationship between education policy and identity by looking at how the learning subject is constituted at national education policy level. The notion of the "ideal South African learning subject", which I suggest, foregrounds national education policy discourse, contradicts the reality of continued class, race, cultural…

Speech act theory-based, second language pragmatics testing (SLPT) raises test-validation issues owing to a lack of correspondence with empirical conversational data. On the assumption that conversation analysis (CA) provides a more accurate account of language use, it is suggested that CA serve as a more empirically valid basis for SLPT…

This paper aims to explore the ways in which nursery workers are constructed through government discourse in England. This is done by offering a deconstruction of key policy texts. The discursive construction of "the nursery worker" within government discourses has shifted over time but currently occupies a highly politicised position.…

An analysis of authentic or genuine interactions among Cameroon English speakers reveals that conversational routines in this variety of English differ a good deal from those obtained in other varieties of English, non-native varieties of English inclusive, and more specifically in native varieties of English. This paper looks at "thanking…