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…

The idea of transformative and troublesome "threshold concepts" has been popular and influential in higher education. This article reports how teachers with different disciplinary affiliations responded to the "concept of thresholds" in the course of a cross-disciplinary research project. It describes how the idea was territorialised and enacted…

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…

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…

Drawing on material collected amongst Danish and Australian humanities and social science academics, the article illustrates and problematises a particular and recurring discursive practice amongst academics: "the conduct of concern". Conceptualising the conduct of concern as an exclusionary and de-legitimising discursive practice, the…

Geographical thinking focuses on the extrinsic meanings of work in English, the meanings extracted from that work, intended or not, through mediating institutional forces, relationships, and modes of spatial organization. It considers how the effects of the work of English educators are mediated by the contiguity of their courses with other…

A study of the discourse of book reviews in several academic disciplines examines how interaction of text and context varies across disciplines. Sixty academic book reviews in linguistics, chemistry, and economics were analyzed for rhetorical structure and for the communicative goal of the genre, that of evaluating knowledge production. The book…

This study analyzed the English discourse organization of sixty academic book reviews in three disciplines (linguistics, chemistry, economics) published in 1990, to help define book reviews as an academic written genre. Analysis revealed that although book reviews show regularities in information form, function, and content, some variation occurs…