This paper describes the forms of knowledge used by players of fantasy sports, games where players create ideal sports teams and compete to accumulate points based on professional athletes' statistical performances. Messages from a discussion forum associated with a popular fantasy basketball game were analyzed to understand how players described…

Research in multilingual societies often attends to the micro level of linguistic interactions, as linguistic minority speakers negotiate their way through a majority-language world. However, this research does not always engage with the social, political and historical contexts that produce and reproduce the conditions within which some…

This article considers a hypothetical decision by a hypothetical learner about whether or not to participate in an online "discussion", viewed through the lens of risk analysis. It begins with the premise that participation online is desirable but that it involves the participant in risk, a fact that needs to be acknowledged and taken into account…

Spoken word is a form of poetry that utilizes the strengths of the communities: oral tradition, call-and-response, home languages, storytelling, and resistance. Spoken word poetry is usually performed for an audience and must be heard. The authors are interested in investigating how spoken word can be utilized as a critical teaching tool that can…

In this article the author discusses the communicative encounters--oral and written--between members of two discourse communities--human resources (HR) and faculty--housed within an urban university in the Northeast. The author focuses on one individual's attempts to articulate and impose a component of her community's implicit rules for behavior…

This article is the second part of a report on research that examined immersion language teachers' strategies to modify their speech in order to maintain use of the target language. As described in the first part in "Babel," Volume 40, Number 2 (Veque, 2005), this classroom-based research, undertaken at Methodist Ladies College (MLC) in…

The developments of new technologies over the last decades provide some answers to the limited exposure imposed on second/foreign language (L2) learners, who study a target language in an academic setting in countries where that language is not actively used. Not only are such learners restricted in their exposure to the L2 in the formal academic…

When analyzing young people's media projects, it is easy to get excited about "youth voice" as a site of free expression and social critique. Tempting as this is, media scholars, as well as young producers and adult mentors, note the varied, often contradictory, voices and interests at play within youth videos, photography exhibitions, and other…

Elementary teachers engaged in weekly conversations about their students' writing. Conversations were guided by a protocol that began with an assessment of students' writing samples and then moved to the generation of instructional ideas. The conversations were analyzed for what the teachers talked about and the extent to which they generated…

Interactive discourse structuring is used to guide listeners through on-going speech and has been shown to have a positive effect on lecture comprehension, particularly in L2 settings. As mobility increases in the academic world, there are more opportunities for lecture events characterized not only by linguistic/cultural diversity, but also by…

Online discussions can extend learning experiences beyond the time and space of the classroom, allowing students more time to process information, and an additional mode of expression for those who are less active in open classroom discussions. They may be especially appropriate for teaching sensitive or controversial subject matter such as…

Accompanying awareness of the potential for lifelong learning to secure social inclusion and economic survival, e-learning has grown in significance and a fragile consensus about its purposes has emerged among stakeholders. The University for Industry (Ufi) and its e-learning arm, learndirect, have focused efforts especially (but not entirely)…

Written communication scholarship has shown that successful social change requires discursive stability. This study was designed to investigate how this stability is created. Critical discourse analysis of 30 corporate university articles investigated claims authors made about the expansion of market-based values into contexts of organizational…

Drawing on the work of researchers in several disciplines, this article describes and discusses methods which can be used for analysing joint activity during computer-based, side-by-side, collaborative activity in educational settings. It is argued that the choice of methods in any particular study should take into account the range of…

As part of a larger project, we studied how a foreign language test got discursively constructed in the talk of upper-secondary-school leavers. A group of students were asked to keep an oral diary to record their ideas, feelings and experiences of preparing for and taking the test over the last spring term of school, as part of a high-stakes…