Explores some possibilities for enlarging and enhancing conceptions and practices of critical literacy via reflective appropriation of electronic technologies, advancing a generic account of critical literacy, investigating how modernist enclosures of the text may be thrown into question in cyberspace, and considering implications for critical…

Presents the results of a study analyzing students' gestures and scientific discourse by supporting three assertions about the relationship between laboratory experiences, gestures, and scientific discourse. Discusses the implications for laboratory experiments which students should attempt to explain while still in the lab rather than afterwards…

Proposes to base research on a metaphor of thinking-as-communicating. Mathematical discourse is made special by two main factors: (a) exceptional reliance on symbolic artifacts as communication-mediating tools; and (b) particular meta-rules that regulate this type of communication. There is a better chance of accounting for some of the phenomena…

Examines the nature of mathematically rich tasks and varied ways in which students respond to these tasks. Explores approaches for using such tasks to foster inquiry that engages children in mathematical practice. (Contains 16 references.) (ASK)

Looks at the strategies used by adult nonnative speakers (NNS) when performing pedagogic tasks. Repairs that make use of discourse markers such as "what I mean is," are identified as being effective in overcoming communication difficulties and completing tasks. Suggests that the ability to make use of such devices is evidence of…

Hip-hop as content in a first-year writing course offers students a powerful way to connect with their worlds. This article draws on Marcel Proust as a kind of rhyme to legitimate hip-hop as a substantive expressive medium to achieve artistry in writing.

With the recent interest in the fifth century B.C. theories of Protagoras and Gorgias come assumptions about the philosophical affinity of the Greek educator Isocrates to this pair of older sophists. Isocratean education in discourse, with its emphasis on collaborative political discourse, falls within recent definitions of a sophist curriculum.…

The dialectic of pitting reality against the perception of reality has been a proclivity of philosophers since the days of Plato and Greek civilization. Most philosophers today regard the availability of a pure reality to be impossible. The world is as it appears to be: thinkers have no access to perfect truth. Accordingly, the matter of…

Approaching the study of literacy through the discourse perspective, this paper first considers some of the relations between discourse and social life. The paper then discusses the epistemological, rhetorical, community-maintaining, and ideological functions of discourse through examination of three types of discipline-based discourses, and…

Freewriting, according to Peter Elbow, is based on an equal affirmation of the student's experience, and his or her right to ground behaviors and writing in those experiences. Insofar as the term "free" in freewriting can be linked to a notion that expression is an event which occurs between a socially and culturally autonomous subject…

There are two major categories of writing, expository and creative. Expository writing includes descriptive writing (description, report, taking notes, outline, exposition, summary, letter, diary, telegram, and minutes) and argumentative writing (argumentation, essay, and comment). Creative writing includes poem, narration, tale, slogan,…

The discourse classification systems used most frequently by reseachers in composition credit A. Bain, J. Moffett, J. Emig, J. Kinneavy, J. Britton, and R. Lloyd-Jones. A majority of the studies that have included discourse types as a major focus of their work were designed to investigate students' syntactic structures. Other studies focused on…

This paper examines the discourses that dominate thinking about assessment in mathematics education; that is, to analyze the sets of constructs, assumptions, and values that underpin research, curriculum development, and teacher education with regard to assessment. Dominant discourses within mathematics education are analyzed and the social…

Informal observations have convinced English teachers that students who read literature on a regular basis and with a critical eye make better writers and that students who experience the frustration incurred during the writing process tend to exhibit a healthier appreciation for the "craft" of literature. The movement to bring both…

A taxonomy of metadiscourse--defined as discourse that people use not to expand referential material but to help their readers connect, organize, interpret, evaluate, and develop attitudes toward that material--was proposed in "College Composition and Communication" (Vande Kopple, 1985). More surveying and classifying has been done since…