Becoming a professional worker involves a wide range of cognitive, social, and cultural processes that have received extensive attention over the past decades amongst various disciplines. It is also not external to language use and communication. Novices in any occupation have to learn technical terms and are expected to master specific discourse…

Whereas former research on academic discourse has paid a great deal of attention to writing and its hedging strategies, this paper aims to show that a complementary and equally important feature of academic spoken discourse is the use of modal certainty. An examination of modal selections in two American Dissertation Defenses additionally reveals…

This report describes a "culturally contexted" conversation analysis approach to the study of naturally occurring speech in supervisory conferences. The supervisors and teachers were participants in a graduate program for beginning teachers, and the conference's purpose was supervisory evaluation of teachers' classroom performances. Ethnographic…

Develops a theoretical framework for understanding the principles that regulate the expression and reception of "everyday" knowledge (attitudes about sex, drug usage) in the classroom. Investigates three different school-based contexts: the formal classroom, small group interaction during lesson time, and group interviews (outside the classroom).…