An analysis of three eulogies (1876-1916) given for Miguel de Cervantes to commemorate the day of his death demonstrates the ways in which the discursive qualities of the eulogy--mourning, celebration, and resurrection--align with regenerative discourses regarding the Nation at particular moments in Spanish history. The eulogized depictions of…

This article presents a pedagogical model for a sequence of first-year composition (FYC) assignments that encourages students' first-hand interpretations as insiders into the workings of educational meritocracy. I focus on how students negotiate the personal statement, an institutionally privileged genre for the discovery and definition of…

This thesis describes new approaches to the formal modeling of narrative discourse. Although narratives of all kinds are ubiquitous in daily life, contemporary text processing techniques typically do not leverage the aspects that separate narrative from expository discourse. We describe two approaches to the problem. The first approach considers…

The goal of this dissertation is to investigate the nature of word order variation in declarative and interrogative clauses in Turkish within the framework of the generative syntax. The specific issue that will be examined in this dissertation concerns the role of discourse-pragmatics in word order variation. I will argue that all movement…

Previous research into enhancing children's educational dialogues during group work has recognised the role of teachers in modelling dialogue and guiding their students' engagement in reasoning. Whole-class plenaries also offer teachers such opportunities but the technological support of dialogue in plenaries remains relatively unexplored. The…

This study takes advantage of a novel methodology--the use of a single culturally-meaningful text written in English and presented to different audiences in ASL--to examine the ways in which Deaf native signers utilize contextualization strategies in order to match the perceived linguistic and informational needs of an audience. We demonstrate,…

Teaching in a monolingual/monocultural, non-English speaking environment can at times be frustrating. Teachers want their students to genuinely communicate with each other in socially acceptable ways, and at the same time become more aware of cultural traits. What is needed in a classroom is a reaction that is real because it is spontaneous. This…

This paper describes how early childhood teachers' incorporation of pauses raises the quality of talk-in-interaction during play-based mathematics activities. Responses of both children and teachers are shown to be more contingent and expansive when conversations include protracted pauses than during interactions in which pauses are largely…

This study provides an analysis of data collected from Chihuahua, Mexico, and Ontario, Canada, educators on how United States (U. S.) policies are taught and discussed in their classrooms. Teachers and administrators were interviewed with regard to their respective curricula and classroom discussions. The researcher sought to gain insight on how…

Background: Rehabilitation services are scarce in low-income countries, where under-representation of some specialist professions has led to the role extension of others. An example of this can be found in Kilifi in Kenya where the role of speech and language therapy has been taken on by occupational therapists and teachers. Aims: To investigate…

Establishing a communication-rich classroom can be difficult. This article describes the process and findings of a practitioner action research study addressing the question of how teachers can interact with their students while they are working in groups to encourage and enhance student-to-student communication. Recommended research-based teacher…

We evaluated the narrative and expository writing samples of 12 adolescents with language-learning disabilities (LLD) in Grades 6 to 12 for elements of microstructure (e.g., productivity, grammatical complexity) and macrostructure (genre-specific text structure elements) using an experimental measure. Writing samples were elicited with…

Family dinnertime conversations are key settings where children learn behavior regulation, narrative skills, and knowledge about the world. In this context, parents may also model and socialize gender differences in language. The present study quantitatively examines gendered language use across a family dinnertime recorded with 37 broadly…

This study focuses on a distinction between process- and object-oriented discourses when characterising the discourse of university students' summaries of lectures and examining connections between students' discourse and the discourse of lectures. Results show that students' discourse in general tends to be process-oriented, by their use of…

To effectively teach university lecturers or students to write a good research article (RA) abstract for publication in international journals, instructors need to know the present characteristics of abstracts written published in such journals. This study examines the discourse structure and linguistic features of RA abstracts written in English…