We report on three experiments that aim at measuring the role of prosody in the acceptability and interpretation of discourse relations between utterances connected by two French discourse markers, viz. "et" "and" and "alors" "then/well." These two discourse markers are highly polyfunctional: "et"…

There has been to date a long tradition of research in workplace discourse. The bulk of the research has focused on professional white-collar workplaces, but a handful of studies have examined working-class settings such as factories and building sites. This area of research has, however, been concerned with interactions involving co-workers.…

The needs of a globalized economy are rapidly changing what is legitimated as school knowledge and values, and calling up new understandings of teachers' role in stimulating democratic spaces. We have termed this "Teachers' Democratic Assignment." We examine changing notions of teachers' democratic assignment in Ireland and Sweden using…

It is widely believed that tourist trade has been the fastest developing trade in the world. In China, with the development of economy and the improvement of people's living standard, travelling has been an indispensable part of living. Therefore, tourism text becomes one of the most effective publicity tool to attractive tourists. A tour guide…

This paper analyses the International Early Learning and Child Well-Being Study, undertaken by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in order to draw attention to the neoliberal, neoconservative, and globalising discourses which underpin the study and generate an image of what is 'best' in early childhood education. The…

Chinese visiting professors, as Chinese university educators, are playing both practitioners and conformists in adapting to Western teaching perspectives and pedagogies while maintaining Chinese teaching beliefs. This study attempts to understand the international university experiences (Canada) of Chinese visiting professors. Arguably, Chinese…

The Mandarin resultative verb compound (RVC; e.g., "tui dao" "push fall" and "pa shang" "climb ascend") encodes complex events composed of an initiating action and resulting activity or state. This study investigated when Mandarin-speaking children acquired this language-specific device. Specifically, we…

The hashtag #justsaying is one of Twitter's global stock hashtags. The hashtag is nontopical and appears to fulfil a complex range of metapragmatic framing functions. In this paper, I shall look at Dutch-language tweets in which the hashtag is being used as a fully enregistered 'translingual' framing device, and I will attempt an analysis focused…

The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine how secondary students at an urban high school perceived and experienced critical English education. This study is situated within a larger ethnographic study in which the researcher employed a Participatory Action Research (PAR) orientation to collaborate with an English teacher who was…

This paper explores what some have described as a 'crisis in meaning' in religious education (RE). One region, Northern Ireland, is chosen as a focus for exploring the question of meaning-making as it provides an example of 'agreed ambiguity' -- where a common syllabus for RE is believed to be ascribed different meanings by different schools. The…

Using the framework of conversation analysis, this study investigated the interactional workings of laughter in task-based interactions. The analysis was drawn from 160 cases of pair work interactions, collected in 2nd-semester Japanese-as-a-foreign-language classrooms. The pair work activities examined in this study are mostly grammar-focused,…

Focusing on writing instruction within an era of international curricular reform, this study analysed classroom observations, educator interviews, and documents related to Japanese elementary writing instruction. A deductive approach using discourses of writing framework and an inductive approach to Japanese cultural practices uncovered beliefs…

Down syndrome is a sensitive subject and one that requires efforts being made to improve conditions for individuals with Down syndrome across multiple dimensions. Social awareness is one of the important dimensions for the inclusion of individuals with Down syndrome. Online spaces, as well as offline spaces, are an important part of our daily…

This article focuses on vocational learning in technical vocational education in upper-secondary school, with a special focus on the object of learning to weld. A concrete teaching situation where the learning object to weld is the focus of the interaction between a vocational teacher and an upper-secondary student was documented by a video camera…

To develop the mathematical discourse of an elementary classroom, I designed an action research project around an intervention of Open Space Technology (OST). Guided by the theoretical perspective of complexity thinking, OST principles created a 'space' or a new structure for learning, where participants self-organized according to interests and…