A qualitative study of group therapy for aphasia was undertaken in order to discover interaction patterns and discourse management strategies that help define "social" or "conversation" group therapy for aphasia. Specifically, an analysis of the discourse of clients and therapists was conducted to identify patterns across therapists and settings.…

The current reorganisation of universities is part of a European policy aimed at strengthening Europe's position with regard to the emerging global knowledge economy. The transformations in view of this overall goal are hardly accompanied by a critical discussion about the function or role of universities within and for society. The common…

Prompted by the author's experience as a participant in an organized partnership with "Adivasis" in south Orissa since the early 1990s; Gayatri Spivak's intimation that the "subaltern can not speak" (Spivak, 1988) [and the "theoretical asphyxiation" of a subaltern politics ably contested in Parry's work as a…

Studies on classroom interaction have typically focused on relationships between turn-taking patterns and some larger unit of analysis of varying length and nature. However, two questions still left unanswered are how teachers talk differently from students in general and how linguistic variation between two participants might relate to…

This paper identifies three underlying discourses on the nature of sexuality evident in two Department of Education curriculum documents on sexuality education in Victoria, Australia, over the past 15 years. These discourses are a cultural "preservation" perspective, a risk minimisation perspective, and a view that sexual expression…

Much has been written about the promise of online learning environments for higher education, and there is a rapidly growing body of research examining the nature of learning and interaction in such courses. This article presents a discourse analysis of an interactive, text-based, online, graduate education course, designed and taught according to…

What the participants share, their common "sense" of the world, creates a foundation, a framing, an orientation that enables human actors to see and act in coordination with one another. For recurrent activities, the methods the participants use to understand each other as they act change, making the intersubjective space in which actors operate…

This study investigates cultural and communication medium effects on conversational argumentation in a decision-making context. Chinese and U.S. participants worked in pairs on two decision-making tasks via face-to-face (FtF) and instant messaging (IM). The analyses showed that Chinese participants tended to engage in potentially more complex…

This study examines how one student pair working face-to-face at a computer and engaged in a web-based discussion environment negotiated meanings for their activity and what contextual resources they used in this negotiation process. The aim was also to study how the students themselves interpreted the learning activity. The subjects were two…

The present study reports on the evidence of first language (L1) attrition in a population that may appear to be the most resistant to L1 changes. Russian monolinguals (n=3) and Russian-English bilinguals (n=10) participated in the study. The bilinguals were graduate students teaching Russian as a foreign language at a U.S. university. The data…

Using a case study approach, this article examines the challenges faced by a cooperating teacher and student teacher during their collaborative planning conversations. I draw on several analytical frameworks, including sociolinguistics, speech act theory and discourse analysis, to analyze the cooperating and student teacher's efforts and struggles…

Background/Context: Young people are often limited in the range of roles and the dialogue routinely scripted for them, and then enacted with them, in schools and other learning settings. Community-based arts classrooms may offer young people access to a valuable alternative resource for learning and development, yet these programs have rarely been…

The hegemony of neoliberalism as an economic and Governmental rationality on a global scale is well documented. How it has come to be that way, and how its relevance is upheld is a complex theoretical and historical-empirical question. This article contributes to the discussion by examining the ways in which neoliberal discourse enters into the…

This paper explores the discourse of whole class teaching in Kenyan and Nigerian primary school English lessons. Twenty lessons were analysed using a system of discourse analysis focusing on the teacher-led three-part exchange sequence of Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF). The focus of the analysis was on the first and third part of the IRF…

The life history method, which achieved a prominent position in the Chicago tradition of sociological research in the early 1920s, has been widely adopted for educational inquiries since the 1980s. The power of the life history method in illuminating subjective teacher experiences in social historical contexts has made it "probably the only…