This article explores the perspectives of 23 girls in their second and third years (12-14 years) at four English secondary schools. Having tracked the girls since their final year of primary school (10-11 years), the article explores how they continue to negotiate powerful discourses in their lives. It uses a Foucauldian framework (1979) to…

This study investigated the experiences of a group of pre-service secondary science teachers in learning to teach in culturally diverse contexts. The pre-service teachers were all assigned to placements within a large, urban, culturally diverse public high school and paired with mentor teachers. Through one-on-one interviews, the pre-service…

This study attempted to scrutinize the disciplinary and cross-disciplinary generic variations of textbook introductions in humanities and basic sciences with reference to the onion model. The data included a sample of 60 introductions (i.e. ten each from applied linguistics, sociology, and psychology within humanities, and ten each from biology,…

This study investigates lexical bundle types found in authentic English business emails and sample emails in business English textbooks in order to identify their similarities and differences. The data employed in the study were sample emails from 77 business English textbooks and emails sourced from the Enron Corporation, representing authentic…

This paper explores the dissemination of human rights through English language learning in Pakistan and builds on the knowledge that contributes to the development of democratic educational outcomes. Textbook discourses have long been the domain of critical linguistics; critical linguists understand textbook discourse primarily as a language in…

We compared the structure and the content of mothers' and fathers' infant-directed speech as a function of infant birth order. Seven first-born and four second-born infants were video-recorded during their natural dyadic interactions with their mothers and fathers at home from the second to the sixth month after birth at 15-day intervals.…

The trajectory of students' unrest in Nigeria universities has been linked to the underside of modernity. By responding to this, the study explores conditions necessary to decolonise the mindset of university authorities and students, against modernity as an offshoot of students' unrest. Ubuntu philosophy rationalised the study while…

Academics are seen as primary agents in the enactment of higher education internationalisation. However, the achievements of internationalisation are claimed to be constrained by the lack of academics' involvement and expertise. This research, therefore, compares the policies and practices of capacity building for academics in internationalisation…

Public policies have a moral order, an ethical horizon. They offer a vocabulary of imagined micro-policies. Using the case of Chile, this paper examines the ways in which accountability policies are reworked within schools and how they affect actors' subjectivities. It adds new findings to the existing body of research on school accountability…

Understanding discourse connectives is an important step to achieving effective verbal communication. Yet, the ability of adult native speakers to understand the broad range of connectives found in most Indo-European languages has seldom been assessed. In this article we demonstrate that some adults have difficulties recognizing correct and…

The concept of sincerity has links to honesty, openness, and authenticity, including of feelings. As expressions of sincerity become formalized in epistolary practice, however, a tension arises between sincerity and the articulation of it. An examination of a corpus of private family letters in French and Spanish from the eighteenth and nineteenth…

Background: Discourse assessment and treatment in aphasia rehabilitation is a priority focus for a range of stakeholder groups. However, a significant majority of speech and language therapists (SLTs) infrequently conduct discourse analysis, and do not feel competent in doing so. Known barriers identified in other countries, specifically a lack of…

This paper explores the impacts of research excellence evaluation entailed in global ranking exercises, a control strategy characteristic of new managerialism, on Chinese Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) academics. The enquiry combines the Critical Incidents Technique (CIT) and internet-based discourse analysis, drawing on mass media texts and…

History is often deemed essential to the construction of national identity. However, the issue of how refugee communities construct their national identity and the image of their historical legacy via the teaching of history is an understudied one. As such, this study examines the role of history teaching in the construction of national identity…

This article presents an analysis of student initiatives in whole-class interactions. While prior research on question-answer sequences in classroom interactions has shown students to be rather passive recipients of knowledge, this article focuses on aspects of classroom interaction where students take a more active role. Following a conversation…