This article takes a discourse analytical approach to elements of the 40th commemoration of the Portuguese Revolution, focusing specifically on the absence of themes and participants by groups who were most directly involved in the Revolution, either as actors (the "Captains of Abril"), the "retornados" (Portuguese nationals…

Drawing upon data from twenty-five interviews, this paper examines how the Maryland State Department of Education's Cross-functional Team navigates its changing role from compliance monitor to breakthrough partner in terms of discourse, time, and flexibility, as it carries out the work of the Breakthrough Center. It also examines how the role of…

This article analyses the ways in which a policy actor constructs its agency through the production of knowledge. Taking the example of the concept of "autonomy" as constructed in the discourse of the European University Association (EUA), the article draws on the theory of discursive framing and agenda setting, as well as on Meyer and…

Although the language we encounter is typically embedded in rich discourse contexts, many existing models of processing focus largely on phenomena that occur sentence-internally. Similarly, most work on children's language learning does not consider how information can accumulate as a discourse progresses. Research in pragmatics, however,…

The article presents a method for analysing recurring curriculum documents using discourse theory inspired by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The article includes a presentation of the method in seven practical steps, and is illustrated and discussed throughout using the author's recent case study on religion, identity and values in Norwegian…

Work based learning and teaching in health care settings are complex and dynamic. Sociocultural theory addresses this complexity by focusing on interaction between learners, teachers, and their environment as learners develop their professional identity. Although social interaction between doctors and students plays a crucial role in this…

Learning science interpreted in existing theoretical frameworks often means that students are assimilated, accommodated or enculturated from the entity of the vernacular world to the entity of the scientific world. However, there are some unsolved questions as to how students can best learn purely a new language or new knowledge of science. The…

What does development of language awareness among very young world language learners look like, especially when they have relatively infrequent exposure to the language they are learning? Adopting an "engagement with language" (EWL) perspective and attending closely to classroom discourse, our research analyses interactional data drawn…

This article presents evidence from a linguistic analysis conducted on the National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education (NCFTE) 2009, and explores the dialogic characteristics of the document driving the current reform of teacher education. I address one orienting research question: in what ways and to what extent are the aims and…

Teacher change towards developing competences for technology use in mathematics teaching has been the focus of current educational reforms worldwide. However, a considerable amount of research denotes the extent to which teachers resist a full integration of technology in mathematics classrooms. The present paper is based on an ethnographic study…

While some scholars have emphasized the culturally contingent nature of disabilities, far less research has attended to the situated and discursive contexts within which those with disabilities and their communities make relevant their own understandings and representations of disability. Drawing from a larger ethnographic study, in this article…

Drawing from the work of "cultural memory" and "racial formation theory" (Omi and Winant 1994) we explore the ascension of Barack Obama as an illustration of how "race" is understood and remembered. This article focuses on the public media discourse of the 2012 Obama re-election to illustrate how the narrative morphed…

This paper examines the history of welfare policy discourse in the United States since the publication of the "Moynihan Report" (1967) and traces its implications for contemporary education policy research. The central thesis is that an overemphasis on "parents" historically invites unwarranted assumptions about autonomy and…

Purpose: Few tools are available to examine the narrative speaking ability of adolescents. Hence, the authors designed a new narrative task and sought to determine whether it would elicit a higher level of syntactic complexity than a conversational task in adolescents with typical language development. Method: Forty adolescents (M[subscript age] =…

Drawing on social and cultural perspectives of literacy, conceptualizations of religious literacies, and Gee's notion of Discourses, I develop a framework for exploring 16 Latter-day Saint and Methodist youths' religious literacies as social and cultural practice. This work grows out of the increasingly important role that religion plays…