This article discusses a documentary film project produced by high school students in Hawai'i that investigated the value of Pidgin (Hawai'i Creole) in schools and society, and which ultimately aimed to address the problem of "linguicism" (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1990). The project was carried out within a critical language awareness framework that…

The purpose of this empirical study was to determine the extent to which three different objective analytical methods--sequence analysis, surface cohesion analysis, and lexical cohesion analysis--can most accurately identify specific characteristics of online interaction. Statistically significant differences were found in all points of…

This article examines several "language practice" interactions among adult immigrant students in an ESL classroom in the U.S. from the perspective of performativity theory. In drawing on performativity theory, it conceptualizes such classroom interactions, along with the research practices used to investigate them, as constitutive actions. That…

In this article, I examine the literacy practices of a high school-based human rights club. I investigate how the group engages in certain kinds of textual production to sponsor and arrange advisory sessions (school-wide meetings between teachers and small groups of students). More specifically, I consider how the club adapts school genres to…

Academic language, the register necessary to be successful in school, has been widely studied in recent years. Researchers have devoted much energy to defining the construct of academic language and identifying ways that teachers can support students--particularly those learning two languages simultaneously--as they develop it. Several scholars…

This paper reports on a design experiment (Brown, 1992) where we explored how providing a linguistic support for understanding historical documents affected students comprehension of historical documents and their disciplinary literacy. The functional approach to disciplinary literacy parallels historians' reading practices while supporting…

This paper offers detailed analysis of ethnographic data concerning an adult literacy student producing and discussing a text about China, using the framework for investigating the discoursal construction of writer identity developed by Burgess and Ivanic (2010). It sheds light on how writer identity changes and develops over time by showing how…

While Hebrew education maintains a dominant position in Jewish educational contexts, little research has looked at what the practice of Hebrew language education looks like on a daily basis. Drawing from an 18-month ethnography of junior high school students attending a private non-Orthodox all day school, this article critically examines the ways…

This paper focuses on seemingly "silly" talk, whispered by Greek-Cypriot students during Turkish-language classes. Taking into account the history of violent conflict between the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities, Turkish-language learners' silly-talk emerges as an interactional space that refracts larger discourses and ideologies, and…

Directives are integral to teachers' pedagogical repertoire, and their efficacy crucial to optimizing learning outcomes. Based on data from a videotaped tutoring session collected at an after-school early literacy program, we describe the specific ways in which certain practices of directives can hinder learner participation and compromise…

Undocumented migration is a major demographic trend, yet both under researched and under-theorized. This is particularly the case for undocumented students in the U.S., as most studies that target this population have spotlighted extraordinary adolescents (e.g., Gonzales, 2008). Much less is known about the everyday unextraordinary experiences of…

The present study explores the ways in which peers take up a teacher-like discourse to enforce normative uses of language in a classroom, effectively socializing one another to the institutional use of English which in turn signals class membership. Such an uptake of teacher-like discourses and practices can be characterized as subteaching…

One of the common practices in many basic schools in Ghana is the constant reminder to students to speak English at all times, and the threat of sanctions to those who do not abide by this language regulation. Considering that Ghana is a multilingual country, one would have thought that any of the Ghanaian languages can be used by students at…

In this paper we examine the complex relationship between dynamics of group talk and students' ideologies of learning. Through an interactional analysis and thematic coding of group talk, this study details barriers to collaboration in a digital storytelling workshop with primary-aged youth in Singapore. Drawing on 25 h of video-recorded data, we…

Propositional analysis of text, including the generation of proposition density ratios, is examined within the context of Alzheimer's research. A discussion of linguistic modularity raises questions regarding the outcomes of propositional analysis and its applications in Alzheimer's research. (Contains 1 figure.)