This study investigated and analyzed the prevalence and presence of indirectness markers in Korean and Persian English Essays. The researchers analyzed the prevalence of the indirectness markers as a set of politeness strategies employed by the Korean and Persian university bound students in their English compositions. Furthermore, the researchers…

This dissertation study aims to theorize an instructional practice which I labeled languaging thinking. Languaging thinking is conceptualized as a social practice in which teachers and students make visible and discuss how to think about a particular task, topic, or activity, through the use of spoken and written language and related semiotic…

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) plays an important role in analyzing text data from education settings. LSA represents meaning of words and sets of words by vectors from a k-dimensional space generated from a selected corpus. While the impact of the value of k has been investigated by many researchers, the impact of the selection of documents and…

Previous policy analysis of the Top Ten Percent Plan (TTPP) has focused on the outcomes of the policy (e.g., Card & Krueger, 2005; Kain & O'Brien, 2004; Long, 2004), answering questions such as whether the TTPP led to increased or decreased access for particular groups. Absent from the literature is an analysis of the policy-change process…

This book innovatively connects the two fields of oracy and practice-oriented empirical research in English language education. It creates synergies and proposes innovative approaches to the study of oracy in the context of learning and teaching English as a second, additional or foreign language. The book also develops a contemporary and holistic…

This paper examines the current educational discourse on work and learning and explores conceptualisations of work-connected learning; in particular, work-based, work-related and workplace learning. It is argued that varying definitions of work-associated learning has led to conceptual confusion in the literature. Through a conceptual analysis of…

Saussurean and Chomskyan "conduit" views of meaning in communication, dominant in much of expert and lay linguistic semantics, presuppose a simple, closed and linear system in which outcomes can be predicted and explained in terms of finite sets of rules. Summarizing critical traditions of scholarship, notably those driven by Bateson's…

The idea of finding Foucault first looks at the many influences on Foucault, including his Nietzschean acclamations. It examines Foucault's critical history of thought, his work on the orders of discourse with his emphasis on being a pluralist: the problem he says that he has set himself is that of the individualization of discourses. Finally, it…

This study is designed to explore the salient linguistic features of the political speeches of the ousted Arab presidents during the Arab Spring Revolution. The sample of the study is composed of seven political speeches delivered by the ousted Arab presidents during the period from December 2010 to December 2012. Three speeches were delivered by…

The present article is an attempt to read Nadin Gordimer's "The Pickup" from the lens of Foucault. It starts with Foucault's assumption that power is everything and any kind of relation in the world is defined through the discourses of power. It discusses the techniques through which the power dominates its authority over the subjects…

Syllepsis (in one meaning of the term) is most commonly thought of as an ungrammatical construction which can in certain contexts function as a figure of speech. Yet the common view is at odds with syllepsis occurring in well-written prose that we experience neither as ungrammatical nor as figurative; and with its being largely ignored by literary…

How might we understand the complex nature of our existence in the world, and what are the implications of such examination? Moreover, how might we go about engaging others in this practice and what are the complications of such an endeavor? Expanding on Quigley, Dogbey, Che and Hallo's findings, I consider the implications of human-environment…

French immersion (FI), one of the hallmarks of French as a Second Language education in Canada and mandated in New Brunswick, Canada's only officially English/French bilingual province, is often the target of language ideological debates surrounding its purposes and expected outcomes. Yet, notably absent in FI scholarship has been a focus on the…

This article takes a sociocultural linguistic approach to code switching in investigating discursive functions of shifts between Standard Japanese and a regional dialect (Iwate Dialect) in women's activity-centered, naturally occurring interactions. The paper extends previous scholarship to a consideration of how shifts are used for discursive…

Epistemicide happens when globalizing West-centric discourses and practices dominate non-Western societies, suppressing and killing the latter's cultural systems of knowledge production. Though scholars worldwide are starting to recognize this fact, China is still forcefully transplanting Western policies and practices in the name of "going…