This paper is an application of Robert E. MacLaury's Vantage Theory (VT) to the analysis of real life spoken discourse. It utilizes Dennis R. Preston's (1994) modification of MacLaury's VT. It elucidates how cognitive processes of coordinate selection and combination contribute to the on-line construction of category membership in the abstract…

It has been recently argued that the particles in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) constitute a grammatical category that actively draws new members to it. Drawing on distributional and collocational evidence, this paper establishes that CSE has a new particle, "ya". The paper then proceeds to analyse the discourse pragmatic function…

Children's picture books dealing with the topic of child sexual abuse appeared in the 1980s with the aim of addressing the need for age-appropriate texts to teach sexual abuse prevention concepts and to provide support for young children who may be at risk of or have already experienced sexual abuse. Despite the apparent potential of children's…

This article draws attention to the contemporary mantra of cosmopolitanism and how it carries altered symbolic representations, new social images and epistemic shifts. The background is the current cosmopolitan turn within the sciences, including within the discipline of education. How can we understand the contemporary makings of this new…

This paper explores the way that learning technologies frame teaching practice in higher education using both autoethnography and discourse analysis (interpretative repertoires). The analysis juxtaposes our own experience in the form of data from two interviews, with teaching and learning policy documents from the group of five Australian…

Given the explosive growth of online communications, new forms of discourse are an intriguing topic of study. This research focused on ten online discussions hosted by "The Chronicle of Higher Education," using content and discourse analysis of the postings to answer several questions. What is the "conversational scaffolding" used by posters in…

My intention in this article is not to solely "talk up" or "talk back" to troubling dominant discourses about, and practices in, educational leadership, but to authenticate and legitimate Indigenous women's voices through theorising their leadership realities and by situating such knowledge in the cultural spaces that they…

This article considers language learner agency from a poststructuralist perspective, focusing on how agency is discursively constituted as individuals position themselves and are positioned as (potential) agents within ideologically defined spaces. As such, I regard agency as inherently unstable and as a discursively mobilized capacity to act.…

The International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum is increasingly popular in both national and international secondary education settings. The "Theory of knowledge" (TOK) course is cast as the prime example of the international globalised values the IB Diploma represents. This article argues that such a positioning is contested within the TOK…

Based on sociocultural theory, this article examines two activities constituted by a parent and child as jointly constructed bi-literacy practices. Bi-literacy practices enable the parent and child to co-construct conceptual meanings and sense across two languages. Concept development in young children "begins" with meaning in one language and…

Discourse analysis can be used to understand and interpret culturally and socially produced meanings regarding work and to outline how specific rules and conventions can configure meaning production of work in context. The implications of some core concepts in discourse analysis pertinent to career counseling are explored, including discourse,…

This article adds to the growing body of research focused on second-language (L2) variation and constitutes the first large-scale study of the production of potentially variable grammatical structures in Spanish by English-speaking learners. The overarching goal of the project is to assess the range of forms used and the degree to which native and…

This study explores questioning practices adopted by elementary teachers while facilitating science inquiry discussions prior and subsequent to their participation in a summer institute in which they were provided with scholarly descriptions of inquiry-based teacher questioning (i.e., typologies of questions used by discourse analysts to…

Studies of communication in early infancy and childhood have highlighted the significance of rhythm, sound and music for emotional and social development. There is, however, little detailed empirical data on the emergence of naturalistic music-related behaviour by children in the early years. The aim of this work is to examine instances of…

The experiences of immigrant and refugee students in schools have been explored by two primary frameworks. The first is informed by sociology and attends to the macro-level adaptation of students in schools and in the host country. The second framework is informed by linguistics and attends to one micro-aspect of the students' adaptation in…