This paper reports on 6-11-year-old children's "sayings and doings" (Harré 2002) as they explore molecule artefacts in dialectical-interactive teaching interviews (Fleer, "Cultural Studies of Science Education" 3:781-786, 2008; Hedegaard et al. 2008). This sociocultural study was designed to explore children's…

This article explores telephone interactions between young children and adult family members as contributing insights to the co-construction of identities within both the nuclear and the extended family. The authors deploy methods of linguistic ethnography to enrich the scope of interpreting the data beyond textual analysis. The study's premise…

This study examines how EFL learners in the non-English speaking communities (Jordan and Germany) handle communication in story-retelling, and uncovers the repair strategies, which they deploy in order to overcome communication breakdowns and pass comprehensible messages to their interlocutors. The study also analyzes factors governing the EFL…

This study examined the ways that the "public good" of higher education is being conceptualised as economic benefits and cost/benefit rationalities in the current economic downturn. Based on the case of Arizona in the United States, a discourse analysis of speeches was performed on the way public, state and institutional leaders…

Collaborative learning and critical pedagogy are widely recognized as "empowering" pedagogies for higher education. Yet, the practical implementation of both has a mixed record. The question, then, is: How could collaborative and critical pedagogies be empowered themselves? This paper makes a primarily theoretical case for discourse…

In this critical discourse analysis of six high-school world geography textbooks, we explore how constructions and representations of North Africa and Southwest Asia have served to reinforce Orientalist discourse in formal curriculum. Visual and written representations in these textbooks were overwhelmingly confounded by a traditional/modern…

The author seeks to revitalize the interests of social educators in the value of using critical, postmodern discourses for rich comprehension of and productive scholarly research in our field. These discourses (a) challenge existing understanding within social education and the knowledge and knower they help produce; and (b) imagine more complex,…

This study provides a discursive analysis of World Bank policy documents in order to reveal the stark omission of a rights-based approach to education, while highlighting instead the support of an economic-instrumentalist approach. Plausible explanations are provided to shed light on this exclusion, including the feasibility critique of education…

In this article the authors present a discussion on the genre of editorial as distinct from that of news-reports in that its language is more loaded with attitudes and more indeterminate and hedged than that in the genre of news-report. Another distinctiveness the authors point out is that the genre of editorial is not only concerned with the…

Every text has a communicative purpose that it performs by dividing itself into generic stages. These stages are assigned specific goals and have differing linguistic structures. This paper makes an attempt to investigate whether there is a definable co-relation between linguistic features and stages in the genre of look-good advertisements. It…

This paper presents conceptions and reflections on initial teacher education for social justice based on a study that sought to identify the discourses produced in the initial education of teachers of the first and second cycles of basic education on the concept of social justice and to understand the effects of those discourses on the educational…

Cohesion, or the connectedness of discourse, has been recognized as playing a crucial role in both language production and comprehension processes. Researchers have debated about the "right" number and classification of cohesive devices, as well as about their interaction with coherence and/or genre. The present study proposes an integrative model…

Two middle schools in rural east Texas implemented an optional, single-sex program. Although previous studies have documented the effects of single-sex instruction, and recent educational innovations have focused on its benefits, little research has investigated its effects in rural contexts. This study found that for rural populations, patterns…

This paper examines the use of Japanese addressee honorific in several social contexts (e.g., family dinner table and faculty meetings) and considers the relationship between social norms and variations. It attempts to reconsider the notion of discernment (Ide, 1989, 2006) in line with Bourdieu's (1977) conception of "habitus,"…

This study explores the construction of discourses about childhood in the Greek daily press. It employs the theoretical frameworks of the new sociology of childhood and critical discourse analysis to question which discourses of childhood are constructed in the daily press presenting cases where children were the victimisers in school violent…