The National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) has been a key tenet of Australian education policy since its launch over a decade ago. Print media coverage of NAPLAN and myschool.edu.au, which displays and compares NAPLAN results across Australia, has played a role in both reporting and shaping this aspect of education policy.…

The various types of interactions that students carry out when engaged in scientific argumentation function together to move forward developing ideas and support sensemaking. As such, incorporating argumentation in classroom instruction holds promise for supporting students in developing and acting with an epistemic agency, being positioned, and…

This article describes a study of TESOL preservice teacher journals that used a thematic linguistic framework of analysis aimed at revealing the extent of their commitment to intercultural communication values, as evidenced by their attitude to cultural differences and stereotyping, and their stance markers. Nearly all entries showed the students'…

This article reports the results of an empirical study exploring the discourses of physics teacher educators. We ask how the expressed understandings of a physics teacher education programme in the talk of teacher educators potentially support the identity construction of new teachers. Nine teacher educators from different sections of a physics…

The definition of leadership changes over time, and the language used to describe leaders is key to understanding what is acceptable and desired in those who lead community colleges at the highest level: the presidency. Language is inherently political, so the discourse around the qualifications of and expectations for presidents has the power to…

In terms of their directness and modification strategies, this study investigated how undergraduate speakers of Turkish formulate their naturally occurring requests in an academic context, in which they request things from an academic in his office. After a 4-year data collection period, the researcher analyzed 395 of the requests (hand-recorded…

This paper draws upon education policy sociology, and sport coaching literature, in critically examining sport coaches as policy actors. Stephen Ball and colleagues' conceptualisation of different policy actor positions and roles provided the framework for research that investigated how eight professional swimming coaches in Victoria, Australia,…

Discourse analysis involves analyzing the language being used. This research investigates the effect of reading interest and achievement motivation on students' discourse analysis competence. To obtain the required data, questionnaires on reading interest and achievement motivation, and discourse analysis were used to test the aspects of cohesion…

Working with normative considerations is an important part of empirical research in religious education (RE) and in the formation of practical theologians, in general, and of religious educators in RE faculties/programs, in particular. What does sufficient reflection on normativity look like in teaching religious educators? From a practical…

New Artificial Intelligence methods hold the potential to transform qualitative research in mathematics education. This study introduces and uses the machine learning technology of simple neural networks to automatically analyse transcript data. This serves as the basis to reflect on the use of machine learning technology in order to uncover some…

Romantic relationships vary in quality, and the purpose of the present investigation was to examine a wide scope of linguistic variables as possible markers of this variability. Ninety-six undergraduate students within committed romantic relationships were asked to write freely about their partnership, following which they reported on relationship…

The thinking underlying people's positions on complex issues is often of limited scope or complexity, yet changing minds is notoriously difficult. We investigated the thinking underlying people's positions on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Rather than seek to influence their thinking by engaging them in considering alternative…

The field of citizenship education witnessed an expanding body of literature looking at the case of China. Yet citizenship with broad conceptual terrain often refers to different things in the literature. This paper foregrounds the common core of the essentially contested concept of citizenship and considers citizenship conception as discourse. By…

This research aimed at investigating the most dominant of transitivity process used in report text and how it relates with the nature of report text. It employed descriptive qualitative design and applied Systemic Functional Linguistics on Transitivity. The data were 29 clauses taken from report texts used in ninth grade's National Exam. The…

Metadiscourse, defined as discourse about discourse, has been borrowed from philosophy into applied linguistics and has evolved as a new area of research in this field. Although metadiscourse is a relatively new subfield in applied linguistics, it has been researched by a range of scholars around the world. The current paper reports the findings…