The theoretical premise of this article is that policy is constructed and presented discursively. The Bologna process presents us with an example of such a policy construction process where the quality policy goals are set jointly in transnational settings, requiring different kinds of negotiations and discursive strategies. Discourse analysis of…

This study investigates the manner in which retrospective miscue analysis involves metacognition by analyzing the discourse of weekly retrospective miscue analysis (RMA) sessions conducted with a fourth grade reader over five months. A preliminary structural discourse analysis of the sessions reveals several procedural and format features of the…

Listservs have become a popular computer-mediated method for communicating with others who share a common interest. They offer subscribers quick feedback and provide a forum for ideas and beliefs to be exchanged, discussed, and modified. Although rarely studied, in some practical fields listserves have been shown to increase communication of best…

Researchers studying science communication have criticized the sensationalism that often appears in journalistic accounts of science news. This article looks at the linguistic sources of that sensationalism by analyzing the journalistic coverage of the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study of hormone replacement research, which was abruptly…

We explore here the potentials of a social constructionist orientation to knowledge for research and clinical practice. Dialogues on social construction emphasize the communal origins of knowledge. They stress the cultural basis of knowledge claims, the significance of language, the value saturation of all knowledge, and the significance of…

Recent research supports the idea that both the content and style of mother-child discourse is important in shaping a child's early moral understanding. This study was designed to further this research by examining how the clarity, elaborativeness, and emotional content of conversations about the past related to a child's sociomoral development.…

When accounting for the usage of some linguistic form, one can refer to its discourse profile, all concomitant features frequently co-occurring with that form in discourse, or abstract a more general claim about its discourse function, referring only to the necessary and sufficient conditions for the proper occurrence of the form. This article…

This study examines a corpus of conversations of Turkish preschool-age children with adults, with the goal of analyzing 2 types of extended discourse structures (i.e., lists and narratives). Lists and narratives are compared with respect to (a) their internal structures, and (b) their social functions in the participants' daily interactions. The…

The article considers the contributions of Gee's Discourse theory to the study of multiethnic identity among mixed heritage students. By framing experience within social context, activity, and interaction, I argue that Discourse theory facilitates a conceptualization of ethnic identity as a situated phenomenon emerging at the intersection of the…

The increasing importance of computer assisted language learning (CALL) in second language (L2) classes has added a new dimension to L2 research, and it has challenged scholars to find valid research methods and theoretical frameworks that can be applied in the analysis of the linguistic and social aspects of the interaction among students and…

This article uses conversation analysis (CA) to describe the structural properties of zones of interactional transition (ZITs) or talk that occurs at the boundaries of different classroom (and perhaps other institutionally oriented) speech exchange systems. Two types of ZIT are analyzed in detail. Counter question sequences (Markee, 1995) are…

This article brings to our attention the intricacies and possibilities of teaching and learning in post-apartheid public schools of South Africa. My argument moves from the premise that if the South African school system is meant to build a democratic nation, then it must reflect the democratic objectives of the nation. Research (e.g. Chisholm,…

To resuscitate means to revive or make go on. This paper is an exploration of my first six months at a Canadian university as a doctoral student. Through a chronological narrative, I explore my experiences through the governing relations of the academy as a way to provoke dialogue about the role of feminist researcher in the institution. By…

This paper summarises findings of discourse analyses of traditional stories from eleven language phyla around the world. The aim is a preliminary exploration of relationships amongst diverse languages in patterns of discourse, using a systemic functional language model. Several techniques were developed for managing and displaying the analyses,…

Based on recent theoretical insights into the conceptual role of metaphors, this paper investigates figurative discourse in the current conceptualisation of the European Union (EU) in Polish. The metaphorical expressions found in the data present a cline of conventionality, and many of them display processes analysed by Lakoff and Turner (1989),…