Consultation of the DfE's Green Paper, "Support and Aspiration: A New Approach to Special Educational Needs," provoked considerable debate among public and private sector professionals, parents and young people over the planned special educational needs reform. Since then, publication of the Children and Families Bill in 2013 indicates…

Modern patients walk a tightrope between respecting medical authority and acting as knowledgeable advocates regarding health issues, with the agency and responsibilities that come with this. This article uses conversation analysis to explore this balance in relation to patient disclosures of medical misdeeds in video-recorded primary care medical…

Science classroom discourse is inherently multimodal in that scientific meanings are made through an integration of multiple semiotic systems (e.g., language, diagrams, equations). Although some studies have described this multimodal nature, few have examined and explained the relationship between the integration of multiple semiotic systems and…

Large enrolment science courses play a significant role in educating undergraduate students. The discourse in these classes usually involves an instructor lecturing with little or no student participation, despite calls from current science education reform documents to elicit and utilize students' ideas in teaching. In this study, we used the 5E…

There has been considerable research both intra- and inter-linguistically on hedging in a variety of languages (e.g. Myers 1989; Markannen & Schroder 1997; Hyland 2005), primarily concentrating on its use in academic writing and identifying cultural differences in the propensity to hedge between different communities of practice. Furthermore,…

A central element of Richard Peters' philosophy of education has been his analysis of "education as initiation". Understanding initiation is internally related to concepts of community and what it may mean to be a member. The concept of initiation assumes a mutually interdependent, dynamic relationship between the individual and community that…

In two eye-tracking experiments we examined whether wider discourse information helps the recognition of reduced pronunciations (e.g., "puter") more than the recognition of canonical pronunciations of spoken words (e.g., "computer"). Dutch participants listened to sentences from a casual speech corpus containing canonical and reduced target words.…

This eleven-month ethnographic study puts critical discourse analysis in dialogue with postmodern conceptualizations of space and place to explore how eight educators talk about space and in the process, produce racialized spaces in Roche Bois, Mauritius. The macro-historical context of racialization of this urban marginalized community informs…

This work is an analysis of small talk in the workplace. The study is intended to fill two main research gaps in the relatively young field of small talk in the workplace studies: On one hand, the lack of quantitative data that would account for the dimensions and the proportions of the elements of small talk interactions; on the other hand, the…

E-mail communication in business and professional contexts has been analysed with a focus on textual and communicative complexity, stylistic conventions, and the relation between e-mails and professional culture. The purpose of the present study is to compare the professional literacy in two professions by studying the use of intertextuality in…

Based on the theoretical understandings from Legitimation Code Theory (Maton, 2013) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Martin, 2013) underpinning the research discussed in this special issue, this paper focuses on classroom pedagogy to illustrate an important strategy for making semantic waves in History teaching, namely "temporal shifting". We…

This article discusses the nature, power and effects of neo-liberal rationale in educational settings. By introducing discourse analysis of two cases, the influence of neo-liberal ideology on contemporary curricula and school programs were examined. The analysis showed that dominant discourses based on neo-liberal rationale presented themselves as…

This article examines one of the ways in which matters of truth, appropriateness, and acceptability are raised and managed within the course of everyday conversation. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, we show that by repeating what another participant has said and doing so with a high rise-fall intonation contour, a speaker claims…

When "A Genomic Portrait--Sir John Sulston" by Mark Quinn appeared in the London National Portrait Gallery's exhibition in 2001/2, the ensuing public controversy over its portrayal raised a number of questions about the representation of a publicly known figure. Because the portrait was the Gallery's first contemporary commission using…

The present study is intended to critically examine metadiscourse markers in 24 master thesis abstracts. Twelve of them are written by non-native Iraqi female students and the rest by native American female students. To do so, the researchers have set two aims: examining the types and subtypes of metadiscourse markers in terms of nativity and…