This article looks at the concept of education for human capital from its origins in the US and Britain as part of a neo-colonial effort, to its current role in dominating educational discourse across Asia. It argues that although there is nothing wrong with promoting education for career success, this should not be the only lens through which we…

Linguistic analyses of the Question Under Discussion (QUD) provide an interesting extension to Tony Sanford's work on discourse coherence (e.g., Sanford & Emmott, 2012). The QUD approach claims that discourse is organized by a series of overt and covert questions and answers to, or comments on, them. In a coherent discourse, material that…

The role and influence of department heads on women in academia is understudied and weakly conceptualized. This article expounds on prior work, which identified limitations of department head literature, to put forth three problematic discourses that run through much of the department head research: the "discourse of fairness," the…

Grice's Cooperative Principle has remained in the limelight especially when it comes to analyzing utterances in a conversation. Although numerous studies have looked into the violation of conversations, real or imagined, on the Gricean maxims, none has explored conversations that are posted on Facebook. This paper then attempted to revisit the…

Discourses of children as deficient and deviant are common within the education system and shape the ways in which educators interact with and respond to children. To illustrate this, we conducted a critical discourse analysis of a provincial policy document that directs schools in the development of Codes of Conduct. Drawing on poststructural…

This study aims to represent metaphoric perceptions of students related to central examination applied in transition to secondary school institutions. Within the study, the phenomenology approach from qualitative research techniques was used. To collect data, a semi-structured interview form developed by researchers was used. Data were collected…

This paper presents lesser known accounts from policy makers whose experiences as elite informants span 40 or so years in Australian early childhood education and care (ECEC) policy history between 1972 and 2009. Drawing on a post-structuralist theoretical frame, this paper employs a Foucauldian-influenced approach to discourse analysis. Given the…

While the present perfect is difficult for English Language Learners (ELLs) to master, this study seeks to provide evidence of its integral pragmatic function in the social task of initiating and developing relationships. Through analysis of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, the frequency of the present perfect, the pragmatic…

The current research is mainly conducted to explore the pragmatic functions of English rhetoric in public speech. To do this, methods of close reading and case studies are adopted. The research first reveals that the boom of public speech programs helps reexamine the art of utterance, during the delivery of which English rhetoric plays an…

A consensus is emerging on the need to use person-centred planning (PCP) as an approach to the identification of educational learning needs and goals for pupils with special needs, including those on the autism spectrum. The aim of this study was to analyse the interactions of participants in one PCP meeting, specifically the nature of…

People overhearing referential communication understand more when they listen in on dialogues rather than monologues. Some have proposed this is because entrainment selects better referential expressions. In a corpus analysis, we considered the role of addressees in contributing to entrainment and measured the degree to which particular…

Knowledge regarding social information is commonly believed to be derived from sources such as formal relationships and interviews and can be plotted as complex networks. We explored whether social networks can also be extracted through other means by using language statistics. In three computational studies we computed first-order and…

Media discourse has been attracting numerous conversation analysts' attention within the past one or two decades (e.g., Clayman & Heritage, 2002; Hutchby, 2006). TV talk shows, as a "semi-institutional" context which contains coexisting features of both daily conversation and institutional language (Ilie, 2001), has particularly…

Over the years neoliberal ideology and discourse have become intricately connected to making science people. Science educators work within a complicated paradox where they are obligated to meet neoliberal demands that reinscribe dominant, hegemonic assumptions for producing a scientific workforce. Whether it is the discourse of school science,…

The authors examine the functions of literacy in three accountability-driven English language arts classrooms. To explore the interplay between transmission-oriented, standards-based instruction and local interpretations and uses of literacy, they employed Pennycook's (2010) notion of relocalization. The authors examine how accountability…