This is a study on discourse as medium of knowledge. Informal education is a system of transmission of knowledge by transmission of discourse people live by. In the humanities and social sciences, the term discourse describes a formal way of thinking that can be expressed through language. Discourses are seen to affect our views on all things; it…

Purpose: Much of a child's day is spent listening to speech in the presence of background noise. Although accurate vowel perception is important for listeners' accurate speech perception and comprehension, little is known about children's vowel perception in noise. "Clear speech" is a speech style frequently used by talkers in the…

Dialogue is promoted as a key strategy to "solve" the "problem" of diversity in educational settings. Yet, "[w]hen we select words … We usually take them from other utterances, and mainly from utterances that are kindred to ours in genre, that is in theme, composition or style" (p. 87, emphasis in the original). This…

Drawing on Vygotsky's insights on the sociocultural origins of development, we examine the French homestay as a site for learning, with a focus on the dinner table. Based on audio recordings of mealtime interactions, interviews, and field notes, we present two case studies of French language learners and their host families. "Amelia"…

Images of leadership serve as mirrors reflecting assumptions and as windows revealing possibilities. We take a visual and less common methodological approach and highlight particular images by way of a linguistic and stylistic analysis. The foundation of this study--an archive of 8,283 images and essays--is noteworthy, since it represents nearly…

Field visits to churches, mosques, temples or other buildings used by religious groups, are often valued by students of religious education as an opportunity to engage with the 'reality' of the subject: religions as they exist in the world. The Council of Europe text "Signposts" specifies field visits as an important contributor to the…

This article explores the carefully managed semiotic complex found in the Corsican village of Pigna with respect to the themes of pride and profit in the valuation of minority languages. This complex includes the careful coordination of color, graphics, the use of the Corsican language, as well as high-tech soundscaping of place through QR codes…

There are many purposes for using language which determine how the writer or speaker chooses words, syntactic expressions and figurative language. This is as a result of the fact that language has a very powerful effect over people, their actions and thoughts. This is seen in the use of language in various discourse types which include…

This article expands on a co-authored project with Timothy Laurie on the practices and ethics of higher degree research (HDR) supervision (or advising): "What does good HDR supervision look like?" in contemporary universities. It connects that project with scholarship on the relevance of "common sense" to questions of…

This paper presents the results of a multidimensional analysis to investigate stylistic patterns and their communicative functions in language teaching research articles. The findings were that language teaching research articles contained six stylistic patterns and communicative functions. Pattern I consisted of seven salient positive features…

The present study investigates the effectiveness of consciousness-raising approach in interpreting conversational implicature using audiovisual input. The study was conducted on 126 Saudi female students at the Department of English Language and Literature at AlImam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh. The experimental group was…

There has been little research into 'language play', the manipulation of language for enjoyment, in children's narrative writing. The unprompted language play of 36 children was investigated in their writing of an imaginative story. The sample comprised three attainment sub-groups from a larger repeat-design quantitative study of writing…

Framed within the discussions of the knowledge base for language immersion teachers, this article presents a qualitative case study of a first-year Grade 2 French immersion teacher's enactment of his systemic functional linguistic (SFL) knowledge to position his students in a culturally sustaining genre pedagogy. We examined interactive events and…

The goal of this paper is to describe a group of adult Mexican English learners' ideologies about different APPRAISAL patterns in English-language scientific texts. APPRAISAL is a descriptive framework of the linguistic resources used to convey feelings and attitudes (Martin & White, 2005). This topic is particularly interesting in EAP…

The number of minutes appended in headlines serves as a signpost for readers regarding the reading time. Being the first on Minute News, this present quantitative study reports the results from comparative analyses of text contents of one-to-five Minute News published by one Philippine and one American media outlet in November 2018. Selected…