Confidence sharing is an asymmetrical dialogic episode to which both parties consent, in which one reveals something personal to the other who participates in the emergence and unfolding of the confidence. We describe how this is achieved at a discursive level within vocational counselling interviews. Based on a corpus of 64 interviews, we analyse…

Just as students need plenty of time to practice skills such as solving fraction problems, they also need time to practice the skills of discourse to become better communicators and stronger mathematicians. Embedded within discourse strategies are specific ways to maximize communication. When repeatedly practiced, students learn to listen to one…

This article offers a critical overview of anti-child trafficking discourse and policy in Southern Benin. The article examines the major trends in interventions pioneered by the dominant institutional actors in the field, and looks at the discursive background against which they are formed. The article contrasts mainstream policy and discourse…

This paper traces the way discourses within early years policy and practice impose meanings onto the signifier "play". Drawing on Bernstein's conceptualisation of recontextualising strategies, we explore how these meanings regulate troubling excesses in children's "play". The analysis foregrounds an underlying question about the hold the signifier…

We expand upon a previous proposal by Bloom and Wynn (1997) that young children learn about the meaning of number words by tracking their occurrence in particular syntactic environments, in combination with the discourse context in which they are used. An analysis of the Childes database (MacWhinney, 2000) reveals that the environments studied by…

Over the past few decades there has been a rapid expansion in alternative "fast track" routes for teacher preparation. Among the most aggressive of these are Teach for All (TFA) schemes characterized not only by their ultra fast entry to teaching (6-7 week course) but also by their underlying philosophy that the so called…

Since the beginning of the federal Race To The Top grant competition, Value-Added Measurement (VAM) has captured the attention of the American public through high-profile media representations of the tool and the controversy that surrounds it. In this paper, we build upon investigations of constructions of VAM in the media and present a discourse…

Social activism and education have been associated with hip-hop since it emerged in New York City 38 years ago. Therefore, it might not be surprising that universities have become interested in hip-hop. This article aims to highlight this "hip-hop academisation" and analyse the discursive mechanisms that manifest in these academisation…

What are the sources of variation in the input, and how much do they matter for language acquisition? This study examines frequency variation in manner-of-articulation classes in child and adult input. The null hypothesis is that segmental frequency distributions of language varieties are unigram (modelable by stationary, ergodic processes), and…

In a Danish context, the acquisition of literacy by the "bilingual student" is embedded in an education policy discourse in which literacy is seen as a cognitive competence that can be quantified by measuring a number of specific skills in a defined language and in a defined written language. On the basis of empirical data from the…

We use insights and methods from ethnomethodological conversation analysis and discursive psychology to develop an account of embodied word and grammar searches as socially distributed planning practices. These practices, which were produced by three intermediate learners of Italian as a Foreign Language (IFL), occurred massively in natural data…

This article examines a rather neglected context of intercultural education: intercultural communication education (ICE). ICE can be found in different fields such as business, applied linguistics, intercultural communication and health education, amongst others. The authors start by reviewing the latest and ongoing changes…

Purpose: Analyses of language production of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) place increasing emphasis on microlinguistic (i.e., within-sentence) patterns. It is unknown whether the observed problems involve implementation of well-formed sentence frames or represent a fundamental linguistic disturbance in computing sentence structure.…

Purpose: Discourse analyses have demonstrated utility for delineating subtle communication deficits following closed head injuries (CHIs). The present investigation examined the discourse performance of a large group of individuals with penetrating head injury (PHI). Performance was also compared across 6 subgroups of PHI based on lesion locale. A…

In the former Soviet Union, the upbringing of children in the spirit of Marxist-Leninist values was central to the project of societal transformation. More than 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is important to understand how the education of young children in this region has changed in response to a world rapidly globalising and…