Danish upper-secondary school is currently undergoing remarkable changes. Comprehensive reforms and restructuring have transformed teacher roles and school organization. However, not all upper-secondary teachers welcome reform: on the one hand, they have to adopt norms, standards and values determined by colleagues, if they want to "fit…

The strabismus conception of masculinity and power with its manipulation as reflected in the consequences of actions endorsed and demonstrated by leaders, followers, citizens as individuals and groups at different times in the past, and present has been a major source of the seemingly quiescence and underdevelopment in Africa. Masculinity has…

This paper presents the results of a small-scale study of codeswitching (CS) between Chinese and English in primary English classrooms with a view to informing classroom interaction with young learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). It analyzes CS of two teachers participating in the Primary English Curriculum Innovation (PECI) project in…

Objective: To examine whether the communication process between diabetes health professionals and people intensively self-managing their type 1 diabetes influenced behavioural change. Design: Telephone interviews to provide insight into the communication process and its influence on diabetes intensive self-management behaviour. Setting:…

Asynchronous text based discussion boards are included in many online courses, however strategies to compare their use within and between courses, from a disciplinary standpoint, have not been well documented in the literature. The goal of this project was to develop a multi-factor metric which could be used to characterize discussion board use in…

This article described the experiences of an inservice professional development program for teachers with a focus on online synchronous discussions. Transcripts of six online synchronous discussions containing 3600 messages from an online teacher professional development course were analyzed. In addition, the researchers interviewed 10…

The memory of the student uprising at Tiananmen Square in 1989 invites one professor to examine more closely what she does: rhetoric and composition, especially rhetorical invention. To examine the kind of power exercised by official Chinese public discourse and whether language could help to avoid reoccurrences such as the loss of innocent…

An interactional model of communication can be based on Erving Goffman's concept of the "interaction order" and the conversation analytic focus on meaning. Three sets of related ideas provide the intellectual foundations for this approach: actions are designed for recipients; talk is multi-functional; and self presentation is semiotic.…

The paper discusses the Spanish expression "bueno," which marks the beginning or the end of background and assertion self-repairs in conversation, and often co-occurs with other expressions, such as "viste" and "no?" which mark the other end of the repair. Background repairs provide information the speaker considers necessary for the hearer to…

In Sundanese, a western Austronesian language, speech levels allow the speaker to establish social identity through talk alone, using multiple linguistic forms with very different pragmatic meanings. These words are deference and demeanor indexicals, as in the French formal versus informal second person. It is argued that although they do exist,…

This study investigates if negotiation can affect syntacticization in the learning of second language (L2) syntax. Evidence from a number of studies has suggested that linguistic modification occurs during negotiation, but no research has examined if such modifications assist the learning of syntax in a second language. This study examined to what…

This paper aims to account for what at first appears to be a unique constraint in the formation of A-not-A questions. Most previous analyses employ the pragmatic notion of focus. This paper argues in favor of a presuppositional account, which has wide empirical coverage and is independently motivated and more theoretically coherent than the notion…

This research study analyzed an electronic conversation that occurred on the LabNet network, an electronic network for science teachers. A conversation about the nature of science that occurred for eight weeks among ten science teachers was analyzed in order to identify the characteristics of messages that start and sustain a conversation and to…

This research employs a mixed theoretical perspective drawing on elements from interactionism and social constructivism. In this study, a discourse analysis is performed on conversations among intra- and inter-institutional mathematics and science teaching faculty participating in reforming content classes for teacher candidates in the Maryland…

A pilot study examined whether a relational control model can be used to evaluate cross examination in academic debate. Four cross examination periods in the 1994 Cross Examination Debate Association Nationals final round were videotaped, transcribed, and coded (using the Relational Communication Control Coding Scheme). Results indicated that the…