This study explored how ideologies of language and literacy and social and academic identities were constructed and contested during a literature discussion. In the event, a group of five (and later six) boys in a fourth grade bilingual classroom attempt to identify an unknown word in their novel: booger. Microethnographic discourse analysis and…

This research study investigated how the teachers and students at a Persian heritage language class acknowledged and modified their affective behavior based on the affective feedback they received from one another. The notion that interactants can modify their affective output in such fashion is referred in the literature as affective alignment…

This article investigates the language attitudes, language practices and identity construction of a group of ethnic minority students in a secondary school in Hong Kong. Drawing on data from focus group and individual interviews, this research shows that the ethnic minority students negotiate and contest their heritage identity by utilizing their…

This study presents a sequential analysis of the enactment of teacher identity in closing disagreements among students in small group peer interactions in an advanced academic writing class. In doing so, it discusses: (a) the micro-details of how oppositional stances and opinions are constructed, challenged and/or defended; (b) the sequential…

This article presents an analysis of a videotaped lecture from a secondary school science classroom. The students in this class had drafted science journalism articles and submitted them for professional editorial review and possible publication in a science newsmagazine for a teenage audience. Before allowing her students to see the editorial…

Unpacking a dialogic speech event that took place in an ESOL teacher education class, this article explores an instance of struggle over ascribed, commonsense meanings that include some U.S. Americans and exclude others. The incident--what Fairclough (1992) has called a "moment of crisis"--turned out to be a powerful, transformative experience in…

The studies in task-based approaches in second language acquisition claim that controlled and goal convergent tasks such as information gap tasks surpass open-ended conversations such as personal information exchange tasks for the development of the learner's interlanguage, in that the formers promote more repair negotiation. And yet, few studies…

This exploratory case study of two undergraduates links vocabulary learning approaches with lexical quality measured in academic writing. Employing an array of qualitative data, it is shown that in a "semi-language-rich" learning context, Chinese learners may dispense with rote learning and engage in a more natural learning approach in which…

Research on multilingual classrooms usually focuses on contexts where both teachers and pupils share the same linguistic repertoire; what can be called "symmetrical" multilingual classrooms. This paper sets out to investigate whether (and how) pupils' multilingual resources can be used in classrooms where the teacher does not share…

In the context of current mathematics and science education reform, teachers are challenged to develop a vision of ambitious instruction (NRC, 2001; Windschitl, Thompson, & Braaten, 2011). This exploratory study examined the discourse of student teacher supervision, focusing on how the conversational frames of supervisors and student teachers…

Ability to write focused expository essays in English is the key to academic success for students in an English-medium education system, but such writing can be a challenge for students for whom English is a Second Language. Focusing writing lessons on improving topic content and grammatical accuracy does not always achieve the expected results.…

Using discourse analytic methodology, this study examines video data collected during a social group intervention designed to promote engagement between teens with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and their peers. The analysis focuses on the interactive means by which the participants construct the identity of the group member with an ASD,…

This paper introduces the goals of the research project on which this special issue of "Linguistics and Education" is based. A case is made for considering contemporary education as saturated by and dependent on oral and written language, and on beliefs and practices that relate knowledge, talk, reading and writing. The project is directed at a…

This paper addresses how teachers can be trained to enable cumulative knowledge-building. It focuses on the final intervention stage of the "Disciplinarity, Knowledge and Schooling" ("DISKS") project at the University of Sydney. In this special issue, Maton identifies "semantic waves" as a crucial characteristic of…

This paper takes as point of departure the register variable field, and explores its application to the discourse of History and Biology in secondary school classrooms from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics. In particular it considers the functions of technicality and abstraction in these subject specific discourses, and their…