Exclusionary school discipline results in students being removed from classrooms as a consequence of their disruptive behavior and may lead to subsequent suspension and/or expulsion. Literature documents that nondominant students, particularly Black males, are disproportionately impacted by exclusionary discipline, to the point that researchers…

We live in a climate ripe for noise: Media outlets and 24-hour news cycles mean that everyone with access to a computer has access to a megaphone to broadcast their views. Never before in human history has an opinion had the opportunity to reach so many so quickly regardless of its accuracy or appropriateness. Of course, it's difficult to hear…

This paper begins by looking at responses to Bernstein in Germany in the 1970s that criticized his notions of class difference in sociolinguistic codes. As part of a re-examination of Bernstein's ideas, the paper goes on to look at the current communicative situation in German education where urban schools have many second-generation immigrant…

This study analyzed personal and fictional narratives of culturally/ethnically diverse students with and without learning disabilities. The participants were 82 fourth to seventh graders from urban and suburban schools located in a Midwest metropolitan area. Narratives were elicited in the context of naturalistic conversation and analyzed using…

This article argues that by using theories of the spatial to understand how situated materiality (i.e., place) and contestations of identity matter when conceiving global and curricular space, educators may interrupt and rearticulate practices and systems of oppression. By focusing on globalization writ large, there is danger of leaving important…

This article discusses a narrative inquiry as a methodology for understanding and examining teachers' interpretations of their environment-related teaching experiences. Focusing on the value of teacher stories for interrogating the discursive practices of schools as institutional contexts, four main rhetorical themes are identified to illustrate…

It is now generally agreed that "output" functions to promote language learning through focus on form. Empirical studies reveal that oral communicative tasks can arouse learners' negotiation of meaning, but they are not so effective in bringing about focus on form. Hence, researchers have suggested using collaborative writing tasks to…

Web 2.0 applications such as YouTube have made it likely that students participate in online back-and-forth exchanges that influence their rhetorical literacy. Because of the back-and-forth nature of online communities, we turn to the procedural, critical, and progressive qualities of dialectic as a means of accounting for what makes public…

This article examines Western and Chinese discourses of education, sustainable growth and development. Education is increasingly considered as a means to fuel economic growth, especially since the 1980s, when conservative economic values became predominant in Western development thought. Despite a discourse on sustainability favouring ecologically…

Background and Context: The context for this study is the American legislative landscape covering the past 35 years, which witnessed a shift in political philosophies concerning the role of government in ensuring the social welfare of its citizens--from a focus on a "safety net" to a focus on "individual responsibility." We frame these contrasting…

Although the main characteristics of procedural discourse are well known, less is known about its various subtypes. Most of the data for the present paper are taken from Category E (skills, trades, and hobbies) in the Brown and LOB corpora, supplemented with examples from computer manuals and a manual for drivers. Following a survey of previous…

This paper hypothesizes that Frank Buchman and Alfred Korzybski were aware of each other and made some comments--written or orally--about each other's work. Support for this hypothesis was developed by concentrating on correspondence, documents, and interviews relative to the two men. The paper also provides documentation about Buchman and…

A functional theory of semantics that accounts for idioms, rigid expressions, and language variability and indeterminacy is explored. The theory is based on the distinction between language as a natural, social phenomenon and linguistic systems as the constructions of linguists, and avoids the usual tendency of theory to assume that language is a…

One of the major problems in artificial intelligence (AI) text generation is text organization; a poorly organized text can be unreadable or even misleading. A comparison of two AI approaches to text organization--McKeown's TEXT system and Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST)--shows that, although they share many assumptions about the nature of text,…

This paper examines United States Representative Hale Boggs's 1971 speech on the House floor, in which he denounced J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for wiretapping members of Congress and infiltrating campus student groups. Following an introduction to the objectives of the paper, the first section reviews Boggs's…