Informed by critical discourse analysis, this purpose of this study was to examine presidential transitions in the U.S. van Leeuwen's Social Actor Approach was used as the conceptual framework to understand how texts are used to recreate, shape and transform a social practice, such as college and university presidential leadership during times of…

The number of multilingual families in Norway has increased during the last decades, but there are no official statistics concerning the linguistic situation in Norway today. Immigrants account for 15% of the population. In addition, there are mixed-language families where one of the parents does not have Norwegian as his/her mother tongue. Most…

Communication difficulties between immigrant families who are non-native English speakers and special education professionals lead to unsuccessful family-professional partnerships. Such difficulties are often attributed to families' low English proficiency or to limited access to quality language services. Other sources of partnership issues are…

As multivalent concepts, projects and formations such as China's Belt and Road Initiative continue to cleave through new spaces, it is increasingly important to attend to the construction, framing, maintenance and dissemination of the sign systems that enable them. Whether or not these systems constitute forms of cultural imperialism, move across…

The 2016 U.S. presidential election brought to light longstanding tensions and bigotry across the country that were further exacerbated when Donald Trump won the presidency on November 8th. While college and university leaders have traditionally refrained from commenting on election results, looming concerns of possible campus protests and…

Our study examines interpersonal functions enacted through a stance marker in spoken ELF academic discourse. We specifically focus on investigating the functions of "I don't know" in an academic speech event by embracing an interpersonal pragmatics and sociolinguistics perspective to figure out how it contributes to the act of…

In the current conditions of globalization and the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF), the notions of pragmatic competence and appropriateness as well as pragmatic failure become of paramount importance to the language learners and instructors. The current article discusses these questions through an approximate replication of Jaworski's…

This study examined the role of written feedback in the academic discourse socialization of second language doctoral students at a Canadian research university. Using a second language socialization framework, and foregrounding the sociocultural and interactional contexts of language learning and use, this article considers written feedback to be…

Web-based writing tools, which allow multiple writers to share and edit the same document, have attracted significant attention as computer-assisted language learning tools in the past decade. However, how L2 writers contribute to the shared document as a social action for interacting with other cowriters remains underexplored in L2 research.…

Content courses for modern language majors at United States universities are a teaching environment where limited research on second language (L2) vocabulary instruction has taken place. On the surface, it may seem that instructors do not plan vocabulary instruction. This study explores this assumption as well as the potential for learning of…

This paper explores the use of creative techniques in a study of the experiences of Russian-speaking linguistic-minority migrant children in English state-funded primary schools at Key Stage Two (7-11 years old). The methodology is based on an interpretative paradigm using a qualitative research approach: a longitudinal multiple-case study with…

Information literacy is a critical topic in contemporary pedagogy and information science, it is ranked among the essential competencies for the 21st century, and in recent years, it has received increasing research interest. The problem, however, is that the research is focused mainly on primary and university (college) contexts and only rarely…

This paper describes the application of a "biosocial" approach to informal health and science education. As an engagement between biological and critical social sciences, biosocial theory has sought to re-articulate human bodies as fundamentally the product of interrelationships between the biological and social dimensions of human life.…

Post-predicate that clauses are one of the indicators of evaluative language which shows the attitude, position, and personal evaluation of the writers in academic discourse. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the distribution and frequently used controlling verbs of post-predicate that clauses controlled by verb (VTHAT) in academic…

This article is an investigation into the characteristics of intercultural competence in a face-to-face tandem language learning context between English and Chinese postgraduate students. It examines idiomatic meaning exchanges through the adoption of a conversation analytical perspective. It is a contribution to the existing body of knowledge on…