Teacher evaluation is a personnel practice in education and a field of study with multiple discourse communities, including a community in supervision. Many concepts from these discourse communities have influenced practice over time. In this article, I place teacher evaluation as a practice originating in the intersection of supervision and…

Since informal learning occurs outside of formal learning environments, describing informal learning and how it takes place can be a challenge for researchers. Past studies have typically oriented to informal learning as an individual, reflective process that can best be understood through the learners' retrospective accounts about their…

South Africa is a highly mobile country characterized by historical displacements and contemporary mobilities, both social and demographic. Getting to grips with diversity, dislocation, relocation and anomie, as well as pursuing aspirations of mobility, is part of people's daily experience that often takes place on the margins of conventional…

Drawing from a social constructionist perspective to written scholarly communication, this paper argues that training in academic writing for students in higher education especially in second language contexts should go beyond emphasis on grammatical correctness and paragraphing strategies, and also focus on the rhetorical character of academic…

The research we report on was conducted from our computer desktops. We have not met the people we have studied; they are part of what Eichhorn described as a "textual community", gathered around the threads of online conversations associated with a website servicing the needs of English-language speakers in Germany. The thread in…

Thanks to the recent developments in the theory of academic discourse analysis, it is now increasingly accepted that negotiation of academic knowledge is intimately related to the social practices of academic communities. To underpin this position and to reveal some of the ways this is achieved, this article analyzes a relatively wide spectrum of…

In this article we explore similarities and differences between two school subjects, Norwegian and mathematics, taking a phenomenological perspective and a didactic meta-perspective (literacy perspective). Our argument is presented on three levels which together build on the perspective of meta-language. First we consider the level of discourse…

Digital games have matured substantially as a narrative medium in the last decade. However, there is still much work to be done to more fully understand the poetics of story-based-games. Game narrative remains an important issue with significant cultural, economic and scholarly implications. In this article, we undertake a critical analysis of the…

This paper is based on an empirical study of assessment practices currently being undertaken in a post-1992 university in the UK. Our broad interest is in examining assessment practices in context in order to explore why lecturers assess in the ways that they do. The Assessment Environments and Cultures project aims to illuminate some of the…

Intergroup dialogue provides what students need in order to relate and collaborate across differences, something they have to do in community projects that usually involve interactions across racial, social class, religious, and geographical divides. In this article, the authors demonstrate the efficacy of intergroup dialogue, drawing from a…

This paper explores two different ontological positions from which policy in schools and teachers can be viewed. On the one hand, it explores the ways in which policies make up and make possible particular sorts of teacher subjects--as producers and consumers of policy, as readers and writers of policy. On the other, it begins to conceptualise the…

The authors investigate how conversational routines, or the practices by which groups structure work-related talk, function in teacher professional communities to forge, sustain, and support learning and improvement. Audiotaped and videotaped records of teachers' work group interactions, supplemented by interviews and material artifacts, were…

This article describes research undertaken in order to design a methodology for the reticular representation of knowledge of a specific discourse community. To achieve this goal, a representative corpus of the scientific production of the members of this discourse community (Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, UPV) was created. This article…

This article examines how an ethnically diverse group of youth critically debriefs their facilitation of diversity workshops for other youth. Using naturally occurring tape-recorded conversations and a critical ethnographic and discourse analysis perspective, the article examines youth's contributions towards a participatory process of learning,…

The paper discusses the various situational features and linguistic devices reflected in the three most interesting and the three least interesting postgraduate second language acquisition lectures taught by three lecturers. Students attending the classes were invited to record their interest level at regular intervals throughout the session. For…