Debates about the nature of practical knowledge and its relationship with declarative knowledge have, over the last ten years, been lively. Relatively little has, however, been written about the educational implications of these debates, particularly about the educational implications of the two broad families of positions known respectively as…

Prosodic features in spontaneous speech help disambiguate implied meaning not explicit in linguistic surface structure, but little research has examined how these signals manifest themselves in real conversations. Spontaneously produced verbal irony utterances generated between familiar speakers in conversational dyads were acoustically analyzed…

This paper considers the embodied nature of discourse for a professional work setting. It examines language in interaction in the airline cockpit, and specifically how shifts in pilots' eye gaze direction can indicate the action of talk, that is, what talk is doing and its relative contribution to work-in-progress. Looking towards the other…

This article argues that in spite of some attempts to expand the diversity of approaches in Technical Communication, the field remains rooted in an expedient, managerial, techno-rational discourse, where discourse is understood as the values that guide research, practice, and teaching. The article draws on approaches from Communication Studies,…

This paper explores the connections between two common circulating discourses about queer youth and the ways that these discourses are wielded in the name of creating safe spaces for queer youth. First, the discourse of innocence is still applied to queer youth, however, the application has shifted to focus largely on the ways that queer youth are…

Speakers tend to attenuate information that is predictable or repeated. To what extent is this done automatically and egocentrically, because it is easiest for speakers themselves, and to what extent is it driven by the informational needs of addressees? In 20 triads of naive subjects, speakers told the same Road Runner cartoon story twice to one…

The assessment of second language (L2) pragmatic competence typically involves questionnaires, such as discourse completion tasks. This article describes a novel approach to using questionnaires to assess L2 metapragmatic capacities while simultaneously promoting their development: engaging learners in cooperative interaction as they complete the…

The article describes a study that was conducted in Malaysia, and at the borders of Chihuahua, Mexico, and Ontario, Canada, to compare the reactions of social studies teachers from Canada, Malaysia, and Mexico to the bombing of Iraq by the U.S. on March 20, 2003. The key objective of the investigations in all three countries was to uncover…

This study investigates the rhetorical move structure of English applied linguistic research article Discussions published in Thai and international journals. Two corpora comprising of 30 Thai Discussions and 30 international Discussions were analyzed using Yang & Allison's (2003) move model. Based on the analysis, both similarities and…

The purpose of this paper is to identify the discourse markers used by Saudi EFL learners in their paragraph writing. The study was conducted on fifty students of the Preparatory Year Program at Qassim University. Data were collected from one hundred paragraphs written by the students at the end of the first and second semesters of the academic…

This paper describes how a locally developed school ranking system affected student enrolment patterns in British Columbia over time. In developing an annual school "report card" that was published in newspapers and online, the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute created a marketplace for school choice by devising an accountability scheme…

In the wake of national educational reform, the author discovered a secondary education style where all students were taught through centrally aired TV-lessons beaming from a studio in the capital city. In order to understand the motive behind the reform and its impacts on teaching, the author collected qualitative data for critical analysis.…

Canada, like other first-world countries, relies in large part on professional immigrants trained in other cultures and languages to complement its workforce in a wide range of professions, including medicine. International medical graduates (IMGs) who are nonnative English-speaking (NNES) and who have trained in different medical contexts are…

Do early childhood education and care (ECEC) professionals make good advocates? Canadian advocates have fought for better child care policies since the mid-1940s. What has happened to this advocacy with the recent increased professionalization of the ECEC sector? How does increased professionalization limit, innovate or expand advocacy strategies?…

In Australian faculties of education, retention and progression issues are paramount within the current neo-liberal climate which emphasises student degree completions. This is particularly the case in regional universities, where many students--often the first in their families to attend university--are from rural, regional and low socio-economic…