Too frequently, representations of disciplinary writing foreground static notions of knowledge creation and literate practice in science and engineering. Rooted in discourse community theory, such representations present normative tropes of scientific practice that background notions of disciplinarity and obscure people's lived experience and…

Most teachers participate in professional development of some kind at some point in their careers, yet many teachers report that professional development neither supports their practice nor improves learning. Thus, more work needs to be done on how professional development can meet those needs. In this study, a group of educators created a…

Educational initiatives in many minority language communities in Europe and beyond are producing 'new speakers' of the languages in question. The status of such speakers is often contested, however, and many people who have been through immersion education in a minority language can find themselves on the fringes of the language community of which…

Following the appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005), in particular the two discourse-semantic systems of Engagement and Attitude, this study examines the extent to which second language learners in a US-Spain telecollaborative project (a) engaged with their own ideas and those of their partners and (b) expressed their attitude towards…

Through a discourse analysis of the qualitative data collected in an ethnographic approach, this study investigates learning emerging in an English teachers' professional learning community (PLC) at a Chinese secondary school in Shanghai. It explores the discourse features of situated interactions in two types of typical events occurring regularly…

The authors designed an assignment for a writing class for late-secondary and early-college students, one with a central goal of giving students the opportunity to engage with a controversial topic by identifying and representing views other than their own. The authors called it a "not my opinion" assignment, and they piloted it in a…

Teachers are responsible for what happens in their classrooms, and promoting civil discourse should be among their top priorities. Not only should they model civil speech and behavior, but they also should establish clear boundaries for students, create a climate that nourishes courteous exchange, and help students build vocabularies that enable…

This study offered insight on the intermingling of discourse communities in the learning environment by examining experiences of composition instructors from a regional Southern university and their reflections of teaching students who struggled to navigate from home discourse to academic discourse. Merriam's basic qualitative research design…

Teachers of writing have two options available to them when it comes to teaching paragraphing. There are, broadly speaking, either "laissez faire" approaches, or tightly prescriptivist ones. While the latter approaches have, at times, been challenged, they are entrenched in textbooks and testing rubrics, and are highly influential in…

Objective: To inform efforts to boost college completion and professional preparation for the linguistically diverse New Mainstream, we explored language and literacy demands, and how faculty conceive of those demands, in one allied health program at one community college in California. We also explore the implications for the preparation of…

If we are to engage more women and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) students to study science, it is important to understand issues of identity and engagement in science. By utilizing identity texts to stimulate the development of scientific identities, practitioners can better understand the process of how young Latinas present and…

Identifying as non-Indigenous, we are often left considering our positionality and identity in Indigenous education, how we have come to be invested in this area of research, and what we see as our contribution. In conversation with one another, we realized we choose to share certain stories and not others about our experiences working in…

In January 2015, President Obama captured headlines in the US by announcing America's College Promise (ACP), a policy that would reverse four decades of privatisation in higher education by making community colleges 'tuition-free'. This research explores the conversation that unfolded across the Facebook pages of various media sources. Key phrases…

The researcher analyzed the Result and Discussion Sections of 10 dissertations of Iranian PhD students and 10 British PhD students by aiming to investigate their use of politeness strategies using Brown and Levinson's (1987) taxonomy and its relationship with the gender of the authors. The results proved that Iranian writers most frequently used…

Background: Focusing on ways a common endeavor brings people together, Gee offered the concept of affinity spaces, which suggests that open participation without exclusion or membership is possible. This theory contrasts with Lave and Wenger's communities of practice, which called attention to situated, hierarchical participatory practices.…