Academic writing is rested on a view of academic negotiation between writers and readers in which writers ultimately aim to gain credibility in their academic discipline. In doing so, they utilize a wide range of linguistic devices based on cultural and disciplinary norms to communicate with readers and convince the readers about the truth of…

In this article, we describe a project on reasoning about socio-scientific issues (SSIs), involving French and Australian pre-service science teachers engaged in on-line discussion and development of a wiki. In the research, we developed frameworks for looking at the quality of reasoning about "socially acute" sustainability questions.…

The relationships between a multidimensional model of school community and civic engagement were examined using survey data collected for the 1999 IEA Civic Education Study from large, nationally representative samples of adolescents in Australia and the United States. This study extends previous research by considering the extent to which…

This article delineates a study which examines both the historical basis of Hmong literacy development (in the years before they left Laos) as well as the more recent history (since 1975) of a Hmong group that settled in northern Wisconsin. The article discusses the development and functions of literacy in the United States, particularly as…

Globalization has brought more and more peoples and societies around the world into contact with "international" standards of law, commerce, and communication. That process has also enabled a number of formerly underdeveloped societies to experience extraordinary patterns of economic growth, especially in the last third of the twentieth…

Workplace literacy has been a recent addition to the field of literacy education and research, achieving a level of "commonsense" acceptability so that its meaning(s) or constructions have largely gone unchallenged. A study, therefore, explored the concepts of "work,""workers," and "literacy," not so much to…

This paper is based on an ethnographic study that examined the study abroad experiences of 20 male Japanese students in Vancouver (Canada) from a post-colonial perspective. This perspective allows the researcher to view the Japanese students studying in the West as deeply embedded in a transnational context where global and national ideologies and…

The persistent cultural conservatism in Western scholarship has led to the exclusion of Chinese rhetoric from the canon of rhetorical studies. However, the assumption that Chinese culture does not have a rhetorical tradition is misleading and inappropriate. It stems from any number of notions: that the Chinese language is not as logical as those…

Noting that metaphor has become a multidisciplinary concern, this monograph examines the concept of metaphor in an educational perspective and describes and analyzes how certain specific metaphors are used in education. To define the concept, the monograph studies different theories of metaphor and previous definitions. To study how metaphor is…

In this paper the archeology of social justice is described as discourses of practices concerning Swedish ways of dealing with gender equality in compulsory school. The paper begins with some recent developments in Sweden that are important for the theme; it continues with the rhetoric in some relevant acts, government bills, and national…

A study, funded by the Australian government, explored differences in the literacy practices of schools, families, and community groups. In particular, the study examined the matches and mismatches between the discourse practices of home and school, and the impact that any differences had on students' school success. Also observed were innovative…

What made the teaching and learning experiences of a five-week pre-freshman composition primer course for minority students and a ten-session seminar on contemporary American literature for a group of teachers of English as a second language (ESL) from black and colored schools in South Africa so radically different for the professor who taught…

The relationship between life history, gender, and the discourse of modernization was examined from the perspective of a researcher with extensive experience performing evaluations about modernization within human services in Denmark. Three stories about site-based management in two human service institutionsa youth center and a boarding school…