The definition and operationalization of interactional competence in speaking tests that entail co-construction of discourse is an area of language testing requiring further research. This article explores the reactions of four trained raters to paired candidates who oriented to asymmetric patterns of interaction in a discussion task. Through an…

The hierarchical system of speech acts developed by Sinclair and Coulthard ("Towards an analysis of discourse: The English used by teachers and pupils." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) to describe interaction in traditional classrooms and later applied to face-to-face communication by Stenstrom ("An introduction to spoken interaction"…

Genre analysis, the investigation of typified communicative actions arising in recurrent situations, has been developed to study information use and interchange online, in businesses and in other organizations. As such, it holds out promise for the investigation of similarly typified communicative actions and situations in CSCL contexts. This…

Seventy-seven new academics--59 at a large, public university in the UK and 18 at a medium-sized, private comprehensive university in the USA--were asked to read an extract of an article on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and mark the text according to categories of difficulty or dislike. Analysis of the data revealed six main…

Rooted in feminist philosophy, critical race theory, and participatory action research (PAR), I partnered with four faculty and four students at an elite, private, college preparatory day school for boys in order to examine bullying. In this article I closely examine the role of language and discourse when conducting counter hegemonic research…

In this paper, I examine and critique the construction of "learning disabilities" at an Ivy League university in the USA. Drawn from a study of the experiences of learning disabled labelled Ivy undergraduates, this paper focuses on the language practices, assumptions, and power relationships that characterize the University discourse within and…

This paper argues that many philosophical arguments within the education discourse are too little embedded in their own historical contexts. Starting out from the obvious fact that philosophers of education use sources from the past, the paper asks how we can deal with the arguments that these sources contain. The general attitude within…

This paper responds to Trohler's charge that my paper "As if by Machinery: The levelling of educational research" takes Francis Bacon's vision of scientific research out of context. I distinguish four senses of "decontextualisation": as ignorance, as belief in "timeless truths", as comparison of contexts, and as genealogy. I argue that Trohler has…

This article reports the findings of a study examining the social/discursive construction of an author (Brenda Dervin) by an international community of researchers (information behavior researchers). A crucial conceptual starting point for the study was Michel Foucault's work on the discursive construction of power/knowledge. The study represents…

This article explores sites of tension and influence between the New Mexico land grant movement and Chicano nationalism. While these efforts diverged often in terms of aims and strategies, they nonetheless found common ground, shaping arguments and providing support to each other during critical years. Moreover, central to their convergence was a…

Until recently, the notion of a "rhetoric of science" may have sounded oxymoronic. Traditional conceptions of science as the embodiment of disinterested, objective knowledge of nature, coupled with perceptions of rhetoric as empty verbiage, subterfuge, or stylistic embellishment, made science and rhetoric appear quite incompatible. However, recent…

A large body of research has shown that verbal phrases such as "move the pen" are better remembered when they are physically enacted than when the same phrases are studied under standard verbal learning instructions (e.g., Engelkamp & Krumnacker, 1980). More recently, a non-literal enactment effect was discovered in which verbal material that was…

This study investigates brain responses to violations of information structure in wh-question-answer pairs, with particular emphasis on violations of focus assignment in it-clefts (It was the queen that silenced the banker). Two types of ERP responses in answers to wh-questions were found. First, all words in the focus-marking (cleft) position…

In this article, 6 key texts from the literature of the learning college movement are examined with the technique of critical discourse analysis. The rhetorical strategies found in the literature are discussed from the standpoint of critical linguistics, and excerpts from the texts are presented as examples of the discursive practices favored by…

The 5th International Conference on Language, Literature and Culture has been hosted by Mehmet Akif Ersoy University (Burdur, Turkey), in cooperation with Çankaya University (Ankara, Turkey) and Süleyman Demirel University (Isparta, Turkey). Our main aim has been to provide a forum for discussion, to facilitate integration in these fields, and to…