The purpose of the present paper is to offer a state-of-the-art review on the topic of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and its theoretical and practical implications on the field of language education. SFL has been widely recognized due to its potentiality to encourage both reflection and action for the participants involved, becoming over…

A longstanding aim of education efforts to position students as knowledge constructors so they are engaged in the building and shaping their learning environment. Current education reforms situate student sense making around authentic science inquiries where students are engaged in the practices of science. In the science classroom, this means…

This paper shows how humour is deployed in Achebe's "A Man of the People" by analysing the make-up of the various instances of humour as well as their significance in attaining the desired effects. To Veatch (1998), humour contains two incongruous elements; one element is socially normal while the other is a violation of the…

Conversation-analytic research has argued that the timing and construction of preferred responding actions (e.g., acceptances) differ from that of dispreferred responding actions (e.g., rejections), potentially enabling early response prediction by recipients. We examined 195 preferred and dispreferred responding actions in telephone corpora and…

Today an increasing number of countries around the world have acquired almost the same metaphorical speech about teaching and learning. These theories grown in the Western world are largely produced within the framework of psychology and individualistic oriented educational philosophy and fits with the ever-expanding financial growth paradigm.…

How should we study the language of political legitimation? Incipient scholarship increasingly seeks to bridge the conceptual schism between the sociological "is" and the philosophical "ought" in the study of legitimacy, looking at public legitimating discourses to uncover the actual "social attitudes" toward…

A techno-rational perspective of teaching and learning is common as teachers are increasingly inundated with messages of measurement, standardization, and accountability. Within this perspective, teacher development is seen as mastery of skills, teachers' learning is conceptualized as linear with a predetermined and predictable trajectory, and the…

This article uses a queer lens in an intersectional analysis of students' schooling experiences in rural China. I argue that a queer perspective has been largely neglected and issues related to sexuality have not been carefully investigated in Chinese educational contexts. Drawing on queer theory and an intersectional framework, I re-interpret one…

We report on the use of bilingual constructed response science assessments in the context of a research and development partnership with secondary school science teachers. Given the power that assessments have in today's education systems, our project provided a series of workshops for teachers where they explored students' emergent…

Calls for a decolonized curriculum in South Africa are gaining momentum. Contrary to the school curriculum that privileges knowledge from a western perspective, indigenous knowledge systems appreciate and draw from local content and forms of knowing. A number of studies have expressed the value of indigenous knowledge systems, and the need for…

In January 2015, President Obama captured headlines in the US by announcing America's College Promise (ACP), a policy that would reverse four decades of privatisation in higher education by making community colleges 'tuition-free'. This research explores the conversation that unfolded across the Facebook pages of various media sources. Key phrases…

21st century skills is a global network of corporate and governmental influences that promotes competences suited to fit the future knowledge economy. Through a discourse analysis of an influential Official Norwegian Report, 'The School of the Future. Renewal of Subjects and Competences' (NOU 2015:8), this paper explores how ideas of 21st century…

Online exchanges among learners are an important form of communication in language learning contexts. This is due to the affordances this medium of communication creates for learning as well as the growing interest in internationalization of curricula. In fact, online communication can foster connections between people, including learners, across…

This article adopts the methods of conversation analysis to track the details of three English as a foreign language novice teachers' language alternation practices in a Vietnamese tertiary context. The analyses focused on teacher instruction-giving in the pre-entry and main instructional phases of lessons. Findings show that language alternation…

Low-fee private schools (LFPS) have grown considerably in the developing world as public free primary education has been unable to cater to the poorest children. Bridge International Academies (BIA), one of the largest chains of LFPS, has positioned itself as a solution to issues of access and quality of primary education. Using newspaper articles…