This research article investigates new developments in the representation of the intercultural component in textbooks for a service technical writing course. Through textual analysis, using quantitative and qualitative techniques, I report discourse analysis of 15 technical writing textbooks published during 1993-2006. The theoretical and…

Drawing from an incident that took place during a year-long investigation of children's play and peer culture on a school playground, the author argues that seemingly neutral child-centered techniques can maintain and even strengthen existing gender inequalities as teachers and children access "laminated" but contradictory identity…

Whilst it is possible to construct early childhood education and care (ECEC) in multiple ways, this article focuses on constructions of ECEC that have emerged within nationalist discourses privileged in advanced Western countries today, that is, ECEC as "national work". Although these constructs are problematic and thus subject to…

This article critiques the Smart Population Foundation Initiative (SPFI), which was established to "bring parenting information and the science of child development to Australian parents and carers" (Smart Population Foundation, 2006) and to satisfy the need for a credible and easily accessible source of information for parents. The…

This study examined video footage (i.e., pregame, halftime, and postgame) of high school basketball coaches' interactions with their male and female athletes during competition, focusing on coaches' use of various regret messages. Participants included 20 high school basketball coaches who were found to use a combination of regret messages:…

In a series of three experiments, we examined how sentential and discourse contexts were used by adults who are learning to read compared with skilled adult readers. In Experiment 1, participants read sentence contexts that were either congruent, incongruent or neutral with respect to a target word they had to name. Both skilled and less skilled…

Although research articles (RAs) have been frequently characterised by impersonal language, which entails the use of nominalisations and passive sentences, self-mentions, that is, explicit references to the RA author(s), are found to intermingle with those impersonal constructions. These self-references can be considered a rhetorical strategy that…

This paper focuses on textual issues in the reporting of action research. There exists a large body of text-analytical work on research reports from various fields, examining for example the organisation and rhetorical purpose of research articles or sections thereof. However, less has been done on the specific issues of reporting action research,…

Scottish official curricular texts, including guidelines and examination papers, are analysed for representations of "self and the environment". The environment is represented as fragmented when it is the curricular focus and is only "whole" when it is background context; "human-environment relations" are dualized;…

This article presents the acceptance speech given on behalf of Dr. D. Chris Anderson, the posthumous winner of the 2004 OBM Network Lifetime Achievement Award. The talk describes how the award winner first became involved in applied behavioral work, amidst a productive career as an experimental psychologist at the University of Notre Dame. The…

This paper critically examines contemporary American classroom discourses and tries to understand the effects of the larger social and cultural meanings that have penetrated the discourses. The central question of this article is why the seemingly justified, admirable, and inspiring ideas of child-centeredness and democratic education often result…

Overlap in conversation is a well-established area of conversation analysis research (e.g. Jefferson 1983; Schegloff 2000) which can reveal how participants orient to transition relevance places. This paper presents an analysis of overlap in the mixed (Garrwa, Kriol and English) language conversations of two indigenous Australian women as part of…

Research has established the predominance of one sequence of interaction in teacher-led activity in the classroom. Although much is known about the initiation-response-evaluation sequence, relatively less is known about other interaction sequences that may constitute classroom lessons. This study examines interaction during a time of individual…

While interaction inside the classroom--frontstage discourse--has been a subject of study and has been considered the most significant type of discourse that teachers engage in, I propose that interaction outside the classroom--backstage discourse--is equally significant and has not thus far received as much attention as it merits. This paper is…

Two interactional strategies explicitly taught to learners of English in Hong Kong are how to check that the hearer understands what you are saying as you communicate and, conversely, how to check that you have understood another speaker's message. The forms of these strategies that are taught in Hong Kong schools are fairly limited. This study…