Heritage language speakers constitute a unique cultural and linguistic resource in the United States while also presenting particular challenges for language educators and language programs. This paper examines the potential of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) in a curriculum for Spanish second language learners/heritage speakers, with…

The paper reports on a study of emergent adult instructed L2 German writing ability in a college-level program that developed an explicit curriculum-based approach to supporting L2 writing. It uses systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) as its theoretical framework and traces writing development through a central construct in the theory, the…

This paper provides a basic introduction to the genre-based literacy research undertaken over the past three decades by educators and functional linguists in Australia and their innovative contributions to literacy pedagogy and curriculum. It focuses on the concept of genre, its place within the model of language and context developed as systemic…

The paper illustrates grammar as a meaning-making resource for early intermediate to advanced adult learners. It focuses on the environment of clause complexing, where different functions, such as Subject and Theme, are unified to construct a rhetorically oriented language logic. The paper suggests that learners' awareness of this logic offers a…

The present ethnographic case study investigates how the identities of immigrant minority pupils are constructed in a multicultural classroom in a Flemish primary school. From the analysis of the class teacher's discourse, it emerges that both Flemish native pupils' identities and those of immigrant minority pupils are constructed as homogeneous:…

Telling stories to children has been the focus of much research conducted mostly in schools and families while other settings where these practices also take place have been ignored. This article presents an analysis of storytelling events for children in three urban informal contexts: a library, a park and a children's bookstore in the city of…

Many corpus linguistic studies have investigated classification of texts into genres and registers, but relatively few of these studies have looked at linguistic features in educational registers. From a pedagogical perspective it is important to determine whether certain linguistic features behave differently across registers within particular…

Focusing on code-switching from conversation analysis and sociolinguistic perspectives, this paper examines interactions between 10-12-year-old language learners of immigrant origin and locally born students as they are engaging in verbal pair work. All are students attending language classes in state primary schools in Barcelona in which Catalan…

This study compared the frequency, structure, and purposes of laughter in writing tutorials between 46 acquainted and unacquainted tutor-student pairs. Of particular interest were instances of shared, or coordinated laughter, which took the form of sequenced, simultaneous, and extended laughter. Familiarity, viewed as a continuum, was also…

This paper analyzes pedagogic practice in primary and secondary Singaporean English classrooms in terms of dialogicity. The dominant interactional patterns in Singaporean English classrooms are initiation-response-evaluation (IRE), whole class lecture and individual seatwork in which the students give either one word answers or remain silent.…

The practice of summary writing from source texts has long been a core activity in academic writing programs. When described as precis writing, textbooks focusing on teaching this skill date back to the second half of the nineteenth century. In current guidelines, students are typically asked to demonstrate an understanding of the key meanings…

This paper focuses on the process of literacy socialization in several 5th grade reading groups. Through close analysis of spoken interaction, which centers on a heavily illustrated, non-fiction text, the paper proposes that these reading groups can be seen as complex sites of socialization to the values associated with essayist literacy (i.e.,…

Mainstream ESL pedagogy has been dominated by monolingual methods for the past century, but the default teaching mode in many EFL contexts is in fact bilingual. A challenge we currently face is to find fresh ways of describing such bilingual teaching. This paper attempts to begin to do so by taking the notions of scaffolding and…

This paper focuses on the discursive and grammatical means by which science students extract and objectify knowledge from the dynamics of the laboratory setting. I argue that nominalization is a particularly important strategy by which this curriculum unit and teacher apprentice students into objectifying the data, evidence, and conclusions from…

This analysis follows students' action and interaction with a single scientific phenomenon (bubbling/gas) over the course of a curriculum unit in a middle school science classroom to examine how and what they learn when doing laboratory activities. Taking a situated approach to interaction, I place the process of objectification in its multimodal…