On film studies courses, students are asked to treat as objects of study the same films which they may more commonly experience as entertainment. To explore the role of academic writing in this, an action research project was carried out on a university film studies course using a systemic functional linguistics approach. This paper presents a key…

This article examines email exchanges between eight Master's-level school counseling student interns and their internship supervisor to investigate how politeness strategies contribute to professional identity development in supervisory discourse. Our analysis demonstrates how identity development occurs via collaborative facework accomplished…

This study investigates the impact of language on students' learning of mathematics. A comparison has been made between English and Korean speaking university students' discourses on "infinity". In Korean, unlike in English, there is a disconnection between colloquial and mathematical discourses on infinity, in that the mathematical word for…

Focusing on the interplay of context and language, this study examined a group of high school students and their mentors' use of language during a robotics competition. This informal setting allowed us to gain insights into the mediation and manifestation of power within the group. Using critical discourse analysis of competition transcripts and…

In "Doing God in education", Trevor Cooling aims to defeat what might be called the "marginalising" view of the place of religion in education. I am sympathetic to this aim; but I think Cooling conflates two different arguments, predicated on two different concepts marked by the term "world-view", and that only one of the arguments is plausible.…

This paper draws on case study data from a study of independent schools in Scotland, to examine school space as a site of mediation of educational dis/advantage and in/exclusion. A threefold and scalar conceptualisation of space is used together with social capital theory to analyse staff and student identifications with relations within and…

The present study investigates the rhetorical structure of academic lecture closings, and the impact of class size on this part genre. A framework of "stages" and "strategies" is developed to analyze the rhetorical structure of lecture closings. Large and small classes are further compared to find how class size may influence the ways lecturers…

The study examined the extent to which a highly qualified interpreter remained parallel with or diverged from the original classroom discourse in her interpreting for a 3rd-grade deaf student in science, social studies, and resource room. The interpreter's signed and verbalized expressions were compared to the class participants' expressions for…

Student speech has and continues to be a contested issue in schools. The Supreme Court ruled in "Tinker" that students do not shed their rights at the schoolhouse gate; in the "Kuhlmeier" and "Fraser" decisions, however, the Court gave school officials greater latitude in regulating student speech, especially when it…

When films rich in cinematic discourse are translated, "character equivalence", the extent to which translated dialogue distorts identities in the original film, may pose a special challenge for the screen translator. This article discusses this issue in the context of "Talk to me" (Lemmons 2007), a film which showcases…

A growing number of studies have examined qualitative research interviews in terms of how researchers' own identities and agendas are implicated in the construction of interviewees' responses. Adopting the constructionist conception of research interviews, the current study introduces a comparative analysis of 2 interviews with a multilingual…

Tutors often fail to address learners' misconceptions. Although this may indicate a failure to grasp these misconceptions, it may simply be due to a wish to be polite and save the learner's face. In this study we examined whether instructing tutors about the pitfalls of politeness could increase the clarity and precision of their tutorial…

In contrast to the prescribed anonymity of the research article, the bio which accompanies it is perhaps the most explicit assertion of self-representation in scholarly life. Here is a rhetorical space where, in 50-100 words, authors are able to craft a narrative of expertise for themselves. It is a key opening for academics, both novice and…

This paper reports findings from a study on the discourse functions of basic "wh"-clefts such as "what our brains do is complicated information processing" in 160 lectures drawn from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. Like much linguistic research on this academic genre, the investigation is motivated by the…

This paper contributes to understanding why curriculum design in a discipline with a horizontal knowledge structure is difficult, time-consuming and contested. A previous paper on the same case study in one sociology department reported that students who had completed the general sociology major found it lacking in coherence. To illustrate the…