This exploratory analysis examined the nature of asynchronous, text-based communication in peer-directed educational discussions. The nature of communication changed over time and women exhibited greater tendency for epistolary communication than men. Initial posts, which were expository in nature, focused on disseminating information whereas…

Taking the case of postcolonial India, this paper explores ways in which present temporal junctures permit a probing of historical boundaries to speak of voices largely silenced from Indian historiography, namely those of British (Indian) public citizens who were committed to the assembling of "an India." In particular, the paper…

Although deemed vital to patient well-being, hope in persons who are terminally ill is often thought to be problematic, particularly when centered on cure. As part of a study on end-of-life decision-making, we asked 28 patients with cancer, believed to be within weeks of their death, to talk about hope. Responses were transcribed and discursively…

Since the beginning, second language acquisition (SLA) studies have been predominantly cognitive in their theoretical assumptions and programmatic agendas. This is still largely true today. In this paper, we set out our proposals for learning talk analysis (LTA). LTA synthesizes insights from linguistic philosophy, ethnomethodology, conversation…

This study is a snapshot of a community of practice in operation. It reports a school-based professional development activity as a learning community with specific attention on one particular member, a "broker", who, by mediating the process of negation, helped bridge a huge knowledge gap regarding subject matter and school context between the…

John McHardy Sinclair has made major contributions to applied linguistics in three related areas: language in education, discourse analysis, and corpus-assisted lexicography. This article discusses the far-reaching implications for language description of this third area. The corpus-assisted search methodology provides empirical evidence for an…

In this article, I add to the critique of the myth of the American Dream by examining ethnographically the ways its dominant discourse is circulated to Khmer American middle school children of migratory agricultural workers. Drawing on social theories of discourse, I juxtapose the ideology embedded in the American Dream Discourse with the…

Adapted primary literature (APL) is a novel text genre that retains the authentic characteristics of primary literature. Learning through APL represents an educational intervention with an authentic scientific context. In this case study, we analyzed the 80-min discourse developed during the enactment of an article from an APL-based curriculum in…

Studies of blind manuscript review have illustrated that readers often form impressions of or speculate about unknown authors' identities in the manuscript review task. In this article, the authors extend that work by examining the discursive and nondiscursive features that play a role in readers' active construction of author voice. Through a…

This article discusses a study on how language use and language development can be promoted through engaging students in different participation roles in board games. Theoretically, the study is grounded in sociocultural perspectives of activity theory and the role of play as a form of human motivation. A group of Grade 4 primary students learning…

This paper is about the questioning patterns of teachers in an early intervention reading program and the exceptions to this typical interactional pattern. Literacy experts recommend a rich diet of oral language for young learners of English literacy. Teachers offer this rich diet by creating an appropriate learning environment in the classroom…

While much of the work in language testing is concerned with constructing quality tests in order to measure language knowledge in reliable and valid ways, there has been a significant movement in language testing research that examines tests in the context of their use in education and society. This line of research exits from the notion that…

As digital media practices become readily available in today's classrooms, literacy and literacy instruction are changing in profound ways (Alvermann, 2010). Professional organizations emphasize the importance of integrating new literacies (New London Group, 1996) practices into language-arts instruction (IRA, 2009; NCTE, 2005). As a result,…

Current research describes multimodal pedagogical communication of two populations of online teachers; trainee tutors (second year students of the Master of Arts in Teaching French as a Foreign Language at the university Lumiere-Lyon 2, France) and experienced teachers based in different locations (France, Spain and Finland). They all taught…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to first define the "jet principle" of (e-)learning as providing dynamically suitable framework conditions for enhanced learning procedures that combine views from multiple cultures of science. Second it applies this principle to the case of the "Global Studies" curriculum, a unique…