In this article, prevailing professional, business and managerial discourses of team leadership are "troubled" by some feminist critiques and analyses of collectivity and gendered discursive relations of power. I draw on a study of primary school co-principalships to describe and reflect on Karen's (a pseudonym) accounts of her personal and shared…

This article explores accounts of student discourse related to the role of physical activity and sport in the lives of Irish children and youth. The data source is a purposeful sample of student narratives based upon age of student, type of school and gender, and sought representation from both rural and urban settings. Data were derived from an…

This paper reports on an ESRC-funded project that investigated the use of corpus-based activities in a primary-school context, with children aged 8-10 years. The study explored the contributions that could be made by a corpus--comprising language written for a child audience--and a modified version of the associated software, in helping these…

In this article, the author explores the confluence of discourses surrounding disability, identity, and institutional writing to better understand the rhetorical politics of disability. She argues that a fresh theoretical frame is needed to understand the ways in which students rhetorically manage "risky" bodily identities, particularly in…

This study explores effects of participation by second-semester college general chemistry students in an extended, open-inquiry laboratory investigation. Verbal interactions among a student lab team and with their instructor over three open-inquiry laboratory sessions and two non-inquiry sessions were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. Coding…

The purpose of this study was to find out how teachers use questions in classroom discourse to scaffold student thinking and help students construct scientific knowledge. The study was conducted in large-class settings where the medium of instruction was English although the students were non-native speakers of the language. Six teachers teaching…

Punking is a practice of verbal and physical violence, humiliation, and shaming usually done in public by males to other males. This definition is based on interviews and discussion groups with 32 adolescent boys and on media sources within which adolescent males are embedded. Discourse analysis findings reveal that punking terminology and…

Discourse intonation attempts to explain how intonation patterns in English affect the communicative value of speech, through the use of falling and rising tones along with changes in pitch. The teaching of intonation seems to sit naturally with communicative language learning, but it is not an easy aspect of English to incorporate into the EFL…

Modern primary teachers must adapt literacy programmes and ensure efficient learning for all. They must also support children with language and literacy difficulties, children learning English as an additional language and possibly teach a modern foreign language. To do this effectively, they need to understand the applied linguistics research…

This study considers some problems of reference found in figurative language, particularly in metaphor and metonymy. Analysis is based on the notion that the effects communicated by figurative language depend to a large extent on reference to more than one concept, experience, or entity, and that the presence of multiple potential referents…

It seems that this paper, as if it were some textual Elvis, by the author's own admission has eluded him. With the set of commas included in the title of the paper, it is not clear whether 2 or 3 people are being referred to. The paper's first version took Bakhtin as the reigning monarch of English studies and applied his complicated and…

Drawing on interviews and on the actual language that readers (students, teachers, and adults) use to interpret and respond to literary texts, this book examines the conventions that shape talk about literature in large groups, small groups, and adult book clubs. By looking across contexts, the four separate but related studies in the book raise…

As a preamble to the development of a storytelling aesthetic, a study analyzed written reports of recent storytelling events to investigate the claim that little theoretical and critical language regarding storytelling is currently in use. Ninety-six reviews of storytelling performances by 11 different storytellers were examined. Sixty were…

Noting that discussions about the interaction of science and politics are often heard, this paper addresses how these discursive arenas are defined and distinguished. It argues that political and scientific discourse may be distinguished by the roles they assume on the rhetorical stage, and the relevant roles which emerge are implementers and…

In a study published in 1987, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson proposed that an abstract sociolinguistic principle guides and constrains a speaker's choice of language, and that this principle explains the politeness phenomenon in conversation. Moreover, central to this principle is the concept of "face," or personal self-image,…