English language teachers who work with children in schools need knowledge about how English works to construct and present knowledge. This article discusses three aspects of that knowledge: understanding variation in the registers needed to engage in different classroom tasks, being able to identify language features used in the disciplinary…

Academic discourse communities and learning circles are characterized by collaboration, sharing commonalities in terms of social interactions and language. The discourse of these communities is composed of jargon, common terminologies, and similarities in how they construe and communicate meaning. This study examines the extent to which discourse…

This paper takes as point of departure the register variable field, and explores its application to the discourse of History and Biology in secondary school classrooms from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics. In particular it considers the functions of technicality and abstraction in these subject specific discourses, and their…

There are primarily two discourses on slang: one is based on the Linguistic Purism View (slang is seen as an ugly, poor and/or dirty vocabulary); and on the other hand, the Socio-historical-cognitive view understands slang as a rich component of language (BARRA, 2007; MATTIELLO, 2005; ZARBALIYEVA, 2012). Taking this into consideration, this…