The hospital critical care unit provides an authentic, high-stakes setting for studying reasoning, argumentation, and discourse. In particular, it allows examination of structural and pragmatic features of informal collaborative argument created while participants are engaged in familiar, meaningful activities central to their work. The nursing…

This paper uses the methodology of conversation analysis (CA) to examine the practice of co-constructed turn and utterance production in impaired communication. An investigation of the conversations between two family dyads, featuring one person with dysarthric speech and one with aphasic language, reveals one way in which single turns and…

This article uses a hybrid of ethnography and discourse analysis combined with an aspect of contemporary narrative inquiry to make sense of a veteran teacher's story. Interview and free discussion data were collated to capture the turning points in the teacher's history. These turning points are discussed, using the analytical categories of…

Background: Charles Van Riper (1905-94) author, researcher and practitioner, was one of the major contributors to the field of stuttering in the 20th century. His series of Action Therapy videotapes provide a useful model of how therapy was implemented by a master clinician. Aims: Van Riper's session with a client is analysed to reveal how voices…

Acoustic emphasis may convey a range of subtle discourse distinctions, yet little is known about how this complex ability develops in children. This paper presents a first investigation of the factors which influence the production of acoustic prominence in young children's spontaneous speech. In a production experiment, SVO sentences were…

Thirty-one chat reference conversations were linguistically analyzed, compared to twenty-three instant messaging (IM) conversations held between students, and further correlated to students' satisfaction with the reference interaction. Conversations between librarians and students in chat reference are more formal than those solely involving…

The research in this dissertation examined the language and literacy practices of middle school children as they played Gamestar Mechanic, a game-based learning environment constituted by a flash-based multiplayer online role-playing game designed to introduce them to the Discourse of game designers, by exposing them to key principles and…

This qualitative study explores educational challenges as manifested in the experiences of the English language learner (ELL) nursing students enrolled in a professional nursing program in San Antonio, Texas. Eleven participants were interviewed for this study using 7 open-ended questions. The research methodology applied in this study was…

This paper examines language-brokering events to better understand how children utilize their linguistic resources to create spaces where the coexistence of two languages can enable or restrict understanding and learning of academic content for themselves and others. An analysis of the structure of language-brokering events reveals that different…

This paper examines the discourses and modes of representation embodied in educational historiography from the 1970s to the present and their implications for intellectual identity construction in SA. The paper shows how the theoretical foundations of the liberal and Afrikaner nationalist discourses, which vacillated between race and ethnicity,…

Prior research has identified ways in which parents and teachers contribute to learned helpless responses to failure, but little is known about the role that interactions with peers might play. In this study, the conversations of fourth- through sixth- grade children and their friends were observed after children experienced an achievement-related…

In recent years, governing through partnerships has become more and more common and is today reflected in a range of policy areas. In the following article, governing through partnerships is analysed in Swedish education policy around the turn of the millennium, where the notion of partnership has had a large impact. Using as its point of…

Three related studies conducted on the role of emotional transfer in email messages were studied in order to better understand Japanese college students' online communications and their broader participation in online communications. The first study investigated users' initiatives in preventing emotional misunderstandings when sending email.…

This article presents research conducted between 2002 and 2007 that examines user discourse, message flow, and exchange frequency in Web-only courses, blended courses, and then the same types of courses extended with a 3D online learning environment. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact that a 3D online learning environment has on…

This article examines interactions from tertiary-level foreign languages classes in which students challenge the heteronormative construction of their sexual identity. These interactions are triggered by questions that potentially reference students' real-world identities but which attribute a heteronormative identity to the questions' recipients.…