The paper studies the forms that are used in planning for a child's early childhood education and care in Finnish day care from the perspectives of social constructionism and discourse analysis. It asks how childhood is conceptualised in these forms and what are the social functions of early childhood education and care as implied in the…

This paper presents results from an ethnography of language policy which examined language policy appropriation for bilingual learners in a large urban US school district. The purpose of this article is to explore the space left by current US language policy for developmental bilingual education and, specifically, the focus is on how a group of…

Immanuel Kant's essay on Perpetual Peace (1795/96) contains a rejection of the idea of a world government (earlier advocated by Kant himself). In connexion with a substantial argument for cosmopolitan rights based on the human body and its need for a space on the surface of the Earth, Kant presents the most rigorous philosophical formulation ever…

This article is based upon a presentation given at the Language Testing Research Colloquium (LTRC) held in Denver, Colorado, in March 2009. That presentation reviewed some of the recent attempts from within our research community to "tell the story" of our field over several decades. It explored how the discourse of these narratives contributes to…

As transnational education collaborations increase so too do concerns about the quality of provision. To address these concerns, national codes of good practice have been written to guide exporting institutions on how to set up and manage international collaborations, so that academic standards and student experiences are not compromised. This…

This article considers the extent to which the needs and aspirations of teachers are taken into account in three examples of current Primary and Early Years documentation--the National Curriculum, the Early Years Foundation Stage and the Primary Framework. This analysis is done through three methods: a critical discourse analysis of the aims and…

Set in a graduate-level multicultural literacy course, this qualitative study draws on Bakhtin's theories of ideological becoming and a hybrid of critical discourse analysis (CDA) methods (Gee, 1996; Fairclough, 1995; 2003) to explore the complexities of learning to teach culturally and linguistically diverse students. We investigated how eight…

We report how the cultural identities of three Black professors influence their pedagogy at a rural, predominantly white, university in the USA. Two critical friends seek clarification prior to the analysis, critique the primary researchers' narratives, and add their voices to the discourse. The primary participants' narratives reveal how values…

The research reported here brings together three settings of conceptual and methodological inquiry: the sociological setting of socio-economic theory; the curricular/pedagogic setting of educational drama; and the analytic setting of ethnomethodolgically informed analyses of conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis. Students…

This study provides an empirical examination of how American learners of German accomplish the social action of requesting in L2 conversation, demonstrating how L2 learners use their linguistic and interactional resources to orient to preference structure in their talk. The data illustrate the sequential contingencies surrounding requests and…

Many accounts explaining teachers' lack of engagement with new technologies in their classrooms engage with discourses that blame their lack of time, expertise, or enthusiasm. In this paper I offer an alternative reading that provides a more agentic explanation. A rhizotextual analysis is undertaken that reveals the connections between teachers'…

This contribution explores rhetorical features in 207 abstracts submitted for four international conferences in Yaounde (Cameroon), Regensburg (Germany) and Birmingham (UK). Relevant text features are retrieved from the corpus via concordance software and results are discussed in the light of their frequency of occurrence. Furthermore, the…

This paper presents the author's response to Xiaoming Xi's article titled "How do we go about investigating test fairness?" In this response, the author focuses on test fairness and Toulmin's model of argument structure, Xi's proposal, and the challenges the proposal brings. Xi proposes an approach to investigating test fairness to guide…

In David Long's article, "Scientists at Play in a Field of the Lord," he studies the discourse between a network of regional scientists, atheists, activists and evolutionists at the opening of The Creation Museum on Memorial Day, 2007. This review essay examines the teaching of evolution through the teacher's "lens of empathy" and also considers a…

Young children produce gestures to disambiguate arguments. This study explores whether the gestures they produce are constrained by discourse-pragmatic principles: person and information status. We ask whether children use gesture more often to indicate the referents that have to be specified (i.e., third person and new referents) than the…