This paper draws on the KINSA project (The Communicative Situation of Immigrants at Swedish Workplaces), which aimed to identify communicative factors that have a positive impact on the integration of second language speakers in the workplace and in their immediate work team. The focus here is on humour and swearing as strategies for doing…

The term "genre" first came into the field of second-language (L2) writing and, in turn, the field of English for specific purposes (ESP) in the 1980s, with the research of John Swales, first carried out in the UK, into the introduction section of research articles. Other important figures in this area are Tony Dudley-Evans, Ann Johns…

Public relations educators are frequently challenged by students' flawed perceptions of public relations. Two contrasting case studies are presented in this paper to illustrate how socially-oriented paradigms may be applied to a real-client project to deliver a transformative learning experience. A discourse-analytic approach is applied within the…

Post-problem reflective tutorial dialogues between human tutors and students are examined to predict when the tutor changed the level of abstraction from the student's preceding turn (i.e., used more general terms or more specific terms); such changes correlate with learning. Prior work examined lexical changes in abstraction. In this work, we…

Recent years have shown the growth of federal legislation and programs having a profound impact on educational policy and practice, and a decline in reliance on broadly based educational justifications. Paralleling this development has been the emergence of well-endowed and influential private foundations, and an increase in corporate influence in…

Protecting children online from sexual predators has been a focus of research in psychiatry, sociology, computer science, and information systems (IS) for many years. However, the anonymity afforded by social media has made finding a solution to the problem of child protection difficult. Pedophiles manipulate conversation (discourse) with children…

Purpose: To present YouFlow Microblog and how its functionalities for discourse structuring and message classification allows improving learning. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach: The authors developed a survey on microblogs and its functionalities for supporting education, and then the authors developed a new…

Rigorous interaction between peers has been an elusive goal in online asynchronous discussions. Intersubjectivity, the goal of peer-to-peer interaction, is a representation of a higher quality of synthesis. It is the representation of knowledge construction achieved through a synergistic progression from individual contributions to sequences of…

This study explored what instructors can do to improve student depth of thinking in online discussion boards (DBs). Participants were graduate students enrolled in online courses within a college of education in the southwest United States. Measurement consisted of discourse analysis of posts in DBs and student self-assessment of dispositions,…

This study explored the stakeholders' construction of quality of Pre-primary Education (PPE) based on the various dimensions of PPE in Tanzania with special attention being paid to policy as discourse. The study involved a total of 129 informants sampled differently. The study sampled parents through convenience sampling technique, while teachers…

Languages tend to be modified to accommodate for the speakers needs, such as, discussing or dealing with certain topics and domains. An example, university students, in Jordan, modify their own language, being colloquial Arabic, with terms and expressions from the English language in order to interact and adapt to everyday college life. Due to…

This study focuses on the social actions taken around English language by a 12-year-old Finnish schoolboy, Simo, and his family members in the course of living their everyday life at home. The paper asks how everyday life learning opportunities are related to both in-class and out-of-class English-language learning. The multiple data (e.g. media…

For language teachers who are concerned about referring to their own and students' identities other than in the roles of "teacher" and "student" in the classroom, this conversation analytic study aims to give insights into the use of identity. Detailed analysis of the data of English for a Specific Purpose (ESP) classrooms…

This commentary reflects on the contributions to learning analytics and theory by a paper that describes how multiple theoretical frameworks were woven together to inform the creation of a new, automated discourse analysis tool. The commentary highlights the contributions of the original paper, provides some alternative approaches, and touches on…

The increased visibility of immigrant communities in the southeastern United States coupled with the economic recession has led to a proliferation of anti-immigrant policies and contributed to a climate which positions Latin@ immigrants and the Spanish language as foreign or threatening. In this article, we examine language ideologies related to…