Linguistics and Education最新文献

Schools worldwide rely heavily on textbooks to disseminate knowledge and guide pedagogical choices. In critical discourse studies, textbooks have been shown to function as national policy instruments, carry a hidden curriculum, and enact a global agenda. The existing literature, however, pays a little attention to the fact that textbooks also represent competing discourses rather than merely being ideological apparatuses. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap by examining national subjecthood, alterity, and the way textbooks engender competing discourses and make them accessible to learners. Based on critical and post-structuralist discourse traditions, 12 English language textbooks were analyzed in one province of Pakistan. National subjecthood appears to have been constituted through various discursive indexes, including religion, gendered subjectivity, languages, literature, and patriotic sentiments among others. The Other is constituted in textbooks both as internals (religious minorities) and externals (e.g., India). Additionally, textbooks offer learners competing discourses with a possibility to negotiate their subject positions.

This article examines a primary-school child's response to a writing initiative arranged by his academic parents to address his writing deficiency in a context of “crisis” discourses about children's writing. While the child protested the intervention, he wrote reluctantly for 18 months and produced 205 texts of over 25,000 words. Analyses of the texts using children's “agency” and “subjectification” showed his linguistic resistance to the writing routine. While he capitalised his dislike of the parental intervention as a recurrent writing topic, he also exploited linguistic transgression, translanguaging and language play as vital mechanisms for resistance. Paradoxically, such forms of resistance also pointed to his mastery of rhetorical conventions and linguistic resources. The findings provide rationale for applied linguists, language educators and researchers to reflect on children's writing development and their agency on one hand and ethical issues in intervening in and researching children's writing life on the other.

This qualitative study examines two multilingual, mainstream, secondary classrooms in the United States in which English learners consistently participated in classroom talk. Using an ecological perspective, this study unpacks these classroom environments and ways these teachers created and facilitated language use. Findings indicate that talk in these classrooms was grounded in classroom norms and structures that were established and then cultivated throughout the course. Highly-structured and familiar communication structures reduced many obstacles to EL participation and recognized all students, regardless of language proficiency, as knowledgeable members of the classroom community. These teachers accounted for language learning and language learners at the outset of the course in the overall structure, design, and delivery, not only within individual activities, lessons, or units. This suggests that teaching ELs in mainstream mathematics contexts can extend beyond EL-specific strategies and modifications to considerations for language learning that can be enacted on a classroom level.

Process writing is one of the most popular writing methods in education, but the early stages of the writing process have received little attention in previous writing research. This article adds to a so-called post-process movement in writing research by asking: What becomes possible when thinking of brainstorming in a collaborative writing assemblage as becoming and rhizomatic? A rhizoanalysis of three events was conducted using data from upper-secondary school students’ collaborative brainstorming sessions to write a musical script. The analysis showcases that brainstorming in collaborative writing is messy and crowded, and that a rhizomatic understanding of brainstorming in collaborative writing is allowing, explorative, and unexpected. Nevertheless, the concept of brainstorming can be misleading in response to what the doings in brainstorming can be(come). Therefore, this article proposes a re-thinking of brainstorming as otherwise, asking whether the notions of idea-ing and becoming ideas might be more generative.

Despite the emphasis on dialogue and argumentation in educational settings, still not much is known about how best we can support learners in their interthinking, reasoning, and metadialogic understanding. The goal of this classroom intervention study is to explore the degree of students’ dialogicity and its possible increase during a learning programme implementing dialogic and argument-based teaching goals and principles. In particular, we focus on how students from 5 to 15 years old engage with each other's ideas, and whether/how this engagement is influenced by lesson and classroom setting factors. The participants were 4208 students distributed in preprimary, primary, and secondary classrooms of five countries (UK, Portugal, Germany, Spain, and Cyprus). Findings suggest that there is a consistent increase with age for some high-dialogicity moves, and students behave more dialogically in whole-class discussions rather than small-group activities.