This study investigated the stability of propositional density (PD) in written texts, as this aspect of language shows promise as an indicator and as a predictor of language decline with ageing. This descriptive longitudinal study analysed written texts obtained from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Women's Health in which participants were…

Evaluation in academic discourse has received considerable attention from researchers. Much of the work on evaluation has focused, however, on written genres, and less attention has been paid to how evaluation unfolds in spoken academic genres. In our present research, we are interested in disclosing how the interpersonal meaning of evaluation is…

In this article, I present six English teachers' perceptions of the dialogue used by principals and superintendents to communicate policy mandates in their schools. I wanted to learn about the ways in which the discourse employed by these two kinds of policymakers influenced English teachers' experiences as professionals and how these policies and…

Informed by Foucault's analytics of power, this critical discourse analysis focuses upon the discursive construction of minority and low-income family identities, primarily using text from interviews of Texas school leaders within the neoliberal context of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Qualitative content analysis was used to discover whether the…

In this article, we report on a study of how creative linguistic practices (which we call "hybrid discourse practices") were enacted by students in a fifth-grade science unit on barn owls and how these practices helped to produce a synergistic micro-community of scientific practice in the classroom that constituted a fertile space for students…

This article explores the theoretical implications around positioning the Black male teacher as the central agent of social change for Black male students. In addressing such concerns, my intention is not to discourage efforts to recruit and retain more African American men as teachers, but to trouble the commonsense assumptions embedded in such…

This study examines the effect of using an online 3D virtual environment in teaching Mathematics in Primary Education. In particular, it explores the extent to which student engagement--behavioral, affective and cognitive--is fostered by such tools in order to enhance collaborative learning. For the study we used a purpose-created 3D virtual…

The study examined the experience of communication in the workplace for mathematics graduates with a view to enriching university curriculum. I broaden the work of Burton and Morgan (2000), who investigated the discourse practices of academic mathematicians to examine the discourse used by new mathematics graduates in industry and their…

This ethnographic study attempts to find, reveal and understand the learning possibilities, from the social learning perspective, in the process of peer feedback activity in a College English classroom for non-English majors in China. The study reveals the nature of Exploratory Practice (EP), and the investigation is guided by EP principles,…

The call for inquiry science to be a part of the school science curriculum is popular in many parts of the world. While some research in this area revealed success stories of students' learning when they are engaged in student-directed, open-ended scientific inquiry activities, others are more sceptical about how these activities impact students'…

In the attempt to evaluate the quality of teacher talk, recent communicative approaches have suggested that the modification of teacher classroom speech and the functional distribution of teacher talk in terms of pedagogical goals should be considered (Seedhouse: 1996). This study investigates the relationship between language use and pedagogic…

This dissertation takes a discursive approach to Hawai'i stand-up comedy, which is a highly dramaturgical genre, and it examines the cultural specificity of Hawaii comedy in an explicitly interactional context. This culturally-specific performative genre is a discursive site where comedians and their audiences jointly construct multivocal humor…

Despite the importance of advising experiences, very little is known about the interpersonal communication dynamics of these interactions. This study addresses that knowledge gap by providing an analysis of audio recordings of advising sessions as they occurred in the offices of five academic advisors who met with undergraduate advisees (n= 28).…

Korean higher education has experienced significant changes since the 1990s. Terms like quality, excellence, competition, efficiency, restructuring, and accountability have become dominant in higher education discourse. These changes are integral parts of higher education reforms implemented by the South Korean government and higher educational…

In this essay, I offer William James's notion of pragmatic belief as a framework for re-envisioning religious discourses as rhetorical resources in composition teaching. Adopting a Jamesian pragmatic framework in composition teaching, I argue, entails two pragmatic adjustments to current approaches. The first adjustment concerns the way we think…