At the national level, debate about school reform typically has been characterized by clashing paradigms offering unicausal explanations and universal prescriptions. At the street level, where parents and practitioners wrestle on a day-to-day basis with questions of what to do, the terms of discussion more typically are concrete, rooted in local…

This paper reports on an analysis of meetings data which forms part of a broader study investigating the use of English as a lingua franca in international business meetings. This discourse analytic stage of research builds on an initial survey which explored the use of English for International Business (EIB) in a particular European…

There have been a growing number of discourse studies in recent years on written academic genres produced by students. However, the master's thesis has not received as much attention as the PhD dissertation. This investigation of master's theses from three disciplines, biology, philosophy and linguistics, employs both discourse analysis and…

Purpose: This paper aims to discuss how sex and relationship education (SRE) could benefit from considering current levels of young women's empowerment in (hetero)sexual relationships and challenge popular notions of twenty-first century young women "having it all" and occupying powerful relational and sexual positions.…

Assessment is essential for designing individualized educational plans (IEPs) for children. In order to contribute effectively to this process, assessments must be appropriate for the group, show neither floor nor ceiling effects, and help teachers formulate specific aims. Different attempts to develop such assessments for the writing of deaf…

This classroom-based study investigated the metatalk of learners working in pairs on a text reconstruction task. Specifically, the study investigated the learners' level of engagement with linguistic choices, and whether the level of engagement affected subsequent language development. Data were collected over a 2-week period. In the first week,…

The aim of this paper is to provide a brief critical analysis of the adult literacy curriculum as one element of the Skills for Life Strategy and to consider how it has been used to legitimise a dominant adult literacy policy based on economic and political rationales. The term critical has many meanings. Here it is used to explore how the adult…

This article explores how the tensions that grow out of being a researcher in my community of queer Asian Americans lead to the formulation of a different kind of ethnographic approach. A hybrid notion of identity can require and inform a hybrid or poststructural ethnographic practice. This hybridized research method draws upon theoretical strands…

This chapter begins with the statement that all talk happens somewhere, somehow, at some time and is produced by somebody for some purpose, and the approach that practice theorists have taken is that talk and its context are inseparable. The challenges that face an analyst of practice are then to describe the context, describe the talk, and…

This article introduces readers to various examples of discourse analysis in mathematics education. Highlighted is interactional sociolinguistics, used in a present study to investigate peer discourse in a middle-school setting. Key findings from this study include the benefits of video modeling as a mechanism for fostering inclusive peer group…

Two-way immersion is a model for bilingual education designed to help language-minority students develop additive bilingualism while at the same time offering language-majority students a chance to learn a second language. There is a great deal of rhetoric around two-way immersion that claims these programs aim to improve overall equity among…

Mainstream ESL pedagogy has been dominated by monolingual methods for the past century, but the default teaching mode in many EFL contexts is in fact bilingual. A challenge we currently face is to find fresh ways of describing such bilingual teaching. This paper attempts to begin to do so by taking the notions of scaffolding and…

The authors question the taken-for-granted notion of supervision. Their concerns arose out of an attempt to introduce "clinical" supervision into academia as a way of addressing an increasing number of the ethical issues which confront lecturers. They recognise that knowledge can impact adversely on students and that lecturers at times find…

This article examines the ideological import of (a) a selection of internationally distributed ELT textbooks to find out whether a recurrent ideological pattern could be observed and (b) the ELT books used in Iranian high schools to see if the ideological import of these books was different from that of the internationally distributed ELT…

By virtue of the non-profit nature of school education, a professional virtual community composed of teachers provides precious data to understand the processes of knowledge sharing and creation. Guided by grounded theory, the authors conducted a three-phased study on a teachers' virtual community in order to understand the knowledge flows among…