This article explores how contemporary professional associations employ discourses of knowledge as a means of promoting professionalism. By analysing policy documents from the Norwegian associations for teachers, nurses, engineers and accountants, we reveal dominant knowledge discourses and discuss how they serve to position the associations in…

This cross-cultural discourse analysis examines the construction of environmental issues on Greenpeace web pages in China, Japan and Germany. To uncover the semantic representation of environmental activism on these sites, the authors sought to identify discursive homogeneity and divergence and to bring to light embedded cultural assumptions. The…

In 2003 a campaign took place against a new model of sex education in South Australia. This campaign, organized primarily by Christian Right groups, included community forums, a letter-writing campaign, extensive media coverage and a parliamentary debate. This paper analyses the language, arguments and strategies used by those who opposed the…

For immigrant-receiving societies that also claim to embrace diversity, there is a constant tension between constraining individual agency (the ability to have and act on choices) and recognizing individual rights. In a previous article, the author highlighted the ways in which newcomer youth are constrained by school discourses (e.g. programs,…

Instructors rely on asynchronous exchanges to provide learners with authentic input and opportunities to communicate in the TL. While most practitioners recognize the advantages of e-mail exchanges, learner benefits are not an automatic byproduct of participation in an exchange. This paper presents findings from an e-mail exchange carried out…

How teachers and students work together through discourse to construct their understanding of the context they live and work in will influence, in many different ways, the interaction within their classrooms. This article will describe a qualitative discourse analysis--involving three different groups of teachers--which focused on the way in which…

This paper reviews some of the ways in which early childhood professionals in England discuss aspects of practice in nurseries for preschool age children. The ways in which professionals talk about and react to early childhood practice tell us much about contemporary understandings of such practice and how concepts and policies developed over time…

This paper explores one-to-one teaching in an academy of music as culturally constituted. Taking Foucault's concept of discursive practice as a point of departure, the practice of two instrumental teachers is analysed and compared with regards to how the teachers adopt professional discourses to construct their teaching in quite distinct ways, and…

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…