In the mainstream discourse on child development and education, 'school readiness' has been conceptualized as the skills and knowledge that children need when they enter school in order to learn effectively in the school environment. However, school readiness is an idea which is entwined with our beliefs about child development and child needs (E.…

The study focuses on the use of technology to design an electronic learning community for students. The importance of social experience in education and social participation through communication is examined through discussion boards of two different freshmen courses offered at Zagreb School of Economics and Management (ZSEM). Effectiveness and…

This article reports on aspects of a recent research and development project in doctoral education. It focuses on the use of email for tutor's formative assessment within the early stages of a Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD) in an English university. Its case study methodology included participant observation of the programme workshops,…

While "internationalization" has become a buzzword in composition scholarship and teaching, our discourses tend toward fuzzy uses and understandings of the term and its multiple implications. We tend to focus on how our U.S. experience is being internationalized: how English and its teaching are spreading; how other countries, different…

Grounded in sociocultural theory, this study uses an ecological approach to examine how student interactions within a dual-language school context may offer affordances for increased linguistic and conceptual understanding. Using qualitative analysis of student discourse, this paper focuses on data from recorded interactions between pairs of…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the nature of the discourse generated by two different online approaches to mathematics teacher professional development. Thirty mathematics teachers participated in online activities involving analysis and discourse about artifacts of teaching practice. Half were randomly assigned to a group that…

A study investigated properties of children's naturally occurring arguments. The arguments were sampled from transcripts of 20 discussions held in 4 fourth-grade classrooms. The principal findings were that children's arguments are filled with seemingly vague referring expressions; that the arguments sometimes do not contain explicit conclusions;…

A study analyzed the choreography of turn-taking and cohesion in classroom computer-mediated communication (CMC) to assess its efficacy as a linguistic intervention. Of the kinds of discussions made possible by CMC, it is the pseudonymous, synchronous conversation that most attracts those who would aspire to the project of changing linguistic…

Since written reports are completed on most calls to which emergency medical technicians (EMTs) respond, report writing is an important part of their professional lives. Discourse analysis focused on how EMTs establish professional authority using specific rhetorical strategies when completing "run reports." One way of understanding the…

This study analyzed writing in prominent British newspapers concerning homosexuality and lesbianism, focusing on these elements of discourse: discourse themes and assumptions underlying their choice; information treated as given or implied in the text; relationships with other discursive formations and texts; signification about the writer's…

Sociopragmatic ambiguity (SPA) is claimed here to differ from other, better-known types of ambiguity, in terms of its locus, cause, and effect. SPA is characteristic of whole-discourse features rather than of lexical items or phrases. The ambiguity is one of social rather than ideational or semantic meaning. It is claimed that SPA arises through…

This paper discusses how to treat code-switching in translations. Examples include use of a word or phrase that is a common expression in the ordinary source language but comes from a related classical language (e.g., "terra nullius," a Latin phrase used in English, a word or expression borrowed from a dialect related to the source language (e.g.,…

In Finland, physical punishment of children is clearly forbidden by the Child Custody Act of 1983, but studies show that up to 72 percent of children under age 14 have experienced corporal punishment at home. This conflict is the subject of the proposed research study described in this article. The article begins with a legislative history of…

The Organizational Communication Culture (OCC) method, designed by Charles A. Bantz (1993) was utilized as the primary method for analyzing messages coming from the administration of California State University, Northridge, after the earthquake. Bantz feels that communication interactions in an organization bring meanings and expectations to that…

This paper first discusses the ways in which Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech demonstrates some of the fundamental principles that should be used to teach rhetorical criticism, and then offers a microscopic, intrinsic criticism of the speech. The paper's four sections (1) review the nature of written speech texts; (2) discuss…