This article uses a fictionalized scenario to examine how three students at an "ordinary" suburban high school in Canada negotiate the context-specific conditions, discourses, and practices that make schools important sites of identity formation. It argues that drawing from Foucault's ideas on the "subjection" of individuals,…

This study examined the nature of power manifestations in a specific online learning setting. The two online classes selected for this study were Master's level courses in a professional school at a large state university in the United States. A total of 1340 postings were made in the two classes over the span of the semester. To test the research…

This study examined the development of spoken discourse among L2 learners of Japanese who received extensive practice on grammatical chunks. Participants in this study were 22 college students enrolled in an elementary Japanese course. They received instruction on a set of grammatical chunks in class through communicative drills and the…

Independent writing is described as a time when students accomplish their own writing through the employment of knowledge and skills that have been the focus for previous instruction. Previous instruction is said to consist of modeling and guided activity where knowledge and skills required for independent writing are taught through social…

Instructors of college/university writing classes commonly ask their students to "share their ideas" in groups. This paper aims to describe the sequential structures of a kind of talk typical to group work: students presenting "reports" about early written drafts. Specifically, the data analysis in this paper looks at how a student's report…

This paper starts by examining recent work by applied linguists who argue that creativity is not only a property of especially skilled and gifted language users, but is pervasive in routine everyday practice. Also variously addressing literariness, language play and humour, this apparent democratization of creativity contributes to a more general…

In this article, we examine the ways in which identities within a classroom are not given, but are formulated in and through the developing discourses, practices and ways of structuring interactional spaces for collective and individual activity. Using an interactional ethnographic approach, we explore how potentials for developing local…

A significant number of calls made to Kids Help Line are seen by the organisation as not requiring counselling support, but are rather young people testing or "checking out" the service. Although the status of many of these "testing calls" is self-evident, determining the authenticity of others presents the helpline counsellors…

Online auctions are dominated by eBay, which started bringing together buyers and sellers in 1995. eBay product listings can easily be used in business communication courses to better understand online sales messages. One great advantage is that the vast majority of nearly 15 million listings a day are written and assembled by everyday consumers…

This post-structural discourse analysis examines how whiteness is discursively and materially maintained and reproduced through an anti-bias discourse. It attempts to surface ways in which counter discourses are mediated within a dominant discourse such as whiteness. Understanding one school's determined efforts to "combat oppression" and the…

Research findings from a longitudinal, classroom-based study of Bachelor of Education students in Tasmania suggest that three dominant discourses of schooling are powerful shapers of pre-service teachers' pedagogical decisions in relation to the teaching of SOSE (studies of society and environment). These discourses appear to inform teaching…

This article is part of a larger study which presents findings from an in-depth longitudinal case study of a student's Ph.D. journey. It shows how criticism is produced and managed in the supervisory relationship. As well as an overview of types of criticism produced across a range of supervisory interactions, the article presents a micro-analysis…

In this essay Maureen Ford examines a selection of situated knowledges discourses in order to make explicit their attention to political effects. She contends, first, that the "epistemic public(s)" constituted through these discourses are multiple, interactive, performative, and layered, and further that they are explicitly political in ways that…

In order to examine the value of explicating genre and rhetorical rules for teaching, this study explores the level of consistency between the linear, deductive discourse pattern recommended for school writing and the actual structure of reading materials selected from seventh- and eighth-grade English language arts textbooks. We focus on 25…

Text analytics refers to the process of analyzing unstructured data from documented sources, including open-ended surveys, blogs, and other types of web dialog. Text analytics has enveloped the concept of text mining, an analysis approach influenced heavily from data mining. While text mining has been covered extensively in various computer…