This study explores technical and professional communication (TPC) students’ design of multimodal career portfolios, focusing on their strategies amid technological advancements and shifting workplace dynamics. The study analyzed 155 artifacts from 31 students, including resumes, video resumes, cover letters, LinkedIn profiles, and rhetorical and modal analyses, using MAXQDA for discourse analysis. The results highlight the importance of research synthesis, intertextuality, audience awareness, personal branding, and adaptability in portfolio development. TPC students effectively create portfolios that meet company expectations across boundaries. A multimodal approach in TPC curricula is recommended, along with further research on emerging technologies’ impact on portfolios.

In the United States, the 2010s saw a significant, organized wave of public philanthropy among the very wealthy. We conducted a discourse analysis of legitimation in The Giving Pledge, a philanthropic endeavor that began in 2010 in which billionaires encourage each other to publicly pledge to give away the majority of their wealth in their life or upon their death. We approach these texts with the questions, “Why do these individuals make these public pledges?” and “What rhetorical work is being done by them?” From the perspective of legitimation theory, how do these public, rhetorical acts constitute the social and economic orders into which they are made? Our discourse analysis of the pledges finds that they constitute two parts of an economic system of wealth, both wealth acquisition and the philanthropic giving of wealth. These constitutions in The Giving Pledge reify an institutional order by appending a promise to give back.

This article presents the development of a specialized data set for analyzing Estonian metadiscourse markers in academic usage, extending Hyland's interpersonal metadiscourse model to a non–Indo-European language. Our goal is to show how metadiscourse, as a feature of a writing tradition, can reveal aspects of writing in languages other than English, complementing the traditionally Anglo-centric perspective in metadiscourse research. By analyzing 21 Estonian linguistics research articles, we offer a transparent procedure to address methodological issues in metadiscourse studies and demonstrate the need for language-specific adjustments in the framework. We introduce statistical methods for analyzing multidimensional associations among marker categories, linguistic level, and rhetorical text structure. The findings suggest that Hyland’s metadiscourse model can be adjusted for specific languages, highlighting the influence of language structure on metadiscourse category variation and linguistic expression levels. The study reinforces that the distribution and manifestation of metadiscourse are shaped, among other factors, by unique writing traditions.

This study conducts a multimodal discourse analysis of the live streaming of Jiaqi Li, a well-known Chinese streamer. Integrating systemic functional grammar and systemic visual grammar to explore the construction of interpersonal meanings in Li's live streams, the authors found that Li uses verbal semiotics to convey information and feelings and, more important, to create his different interactive roles as an authoritative opinion leader, a protector of consumers’ benefits, and a friend who shares his experiences and recommends products. This study offers insight into e-commerce discourse and communication, adding to the literature on live streaming in commerce and business communication.

This article explores genres as recurrent acts of positioning that contribute to associating particular positions with the genre users as social actors. As an illustration, the study investigates the positioning of Chinese university presidents in their published opening convocation speeches. By combining rhetorical move analysis with the positioning triangle framework, this study demystifies three positions conventionally used by university presidents in the genre: guiding educator, morale builder, and university representative. These positions, legitimized by the role of the university president, establish specific types of social relations between the president and the students, which function as channels for the transmission of values, particularly collective values, to address relevant social expectations in Chinese society. This study suggests that the genre-based positioning analysis can offer valuable genre knowledge to novice practitioners, enabling them to familiarize themselves with adequate positionings that adhere to the code of conduct within a discourse community, thereby facilitating effective genre realization.

PDF version Abstract This paper examines the written, spoken, and performed texts at The Alamo to quantify and analyze the white narratives that are presented. Through the use of a content and discourse analysis, we evaluate the rhetorical strategies The Alamo uses as it communicates Texas history to visitors. Our findings indicate that Anglo/white people… Continue reading “Our Beloved Alamo”: Racism and Texas Exceptionalism in Public Memory Systems

Although a growing body of research recognizes the importance of viewing argumentation as a means of understanding rather than combating others, little is known about how teachers cultivate this practice in classroom conversations when teaching argumentation. This study examines how argument can be taught in classroom discourse with an empathizing stance and generates associated pedagogical constructs. Adopting a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis, this study examines the key instructional events in an argumentative writing unit in two high school English language arts classes. The analysis demonstrates that the empathizing stance is introduced in the relationship between arguers and their warrants and the differences existing between arguers. It also generates four pedagogical constructs related to the teaching of argument with the stance: (1) identifying the connection between arguers’ warrants and backgrounds; (2) transposing oneself into others’ backgrounds; (3) exploring interlocutors’ common and divergent grounds; and (4) situating argument in a broader context. It concludes with a discussion of the affordances of teaching argument with an empathizing stance.

This essay conducts critical discourse analysis of website landing pages for community college English departments that have explicitly adopted Guided Pathways reforms. The analysis examines how the social practice of teaching English is recontextualized through discourse.

Time and temporality are variously conceptualized and employed ubiquitously in both theoretical and empirical studies of education and literacy. Since education and learning are inherently defined as change over time, any theory of learning or education makes implicit or explicit claims about the nature of time. In this exploratory conceptual review / theoretical essay, temporal discourse analysis is used to identify the temporal claims operating in six studies drawing on six different theoretical framings: (1) predictive theorizing (Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002); (2) developmental theorizing (Sulzby, 1985); (3) sociocultural theorizing (Gonzalez et al., 1995); (4) critical literacy theorizing (Jones & Enriquez, 2009); (5) critical race theory (Solórzano & Yosso, 2001); and (6) queer theorizing (Schey, 2023). Each theorization brings theoretical, methodological, and practical implications related to how research might be conducted, what changes across time, how time operates, and what might be tracked across time. Theorizations of time have substantive implications for what happens in classrooms and how what happens is interpreted by teachers, students, and researchers.

I propose Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) as an approach for understanding the discursive and material implications of technical documents in distant sites. I provide a historical vignette of MCDA and exemplify how technical and professional communication (TPC) researchers can critically engage with distant sites through MCDA by analyzing materials about GhanaPostGPS, a geolocation technology. I conclude by discussing limitations of MCDA – access to archives – and propose the creation of crowdsourced technical documentation archives.

Research has shown the benefits of peer interaction to scaffold learning of disciplinary literacies. We extend knowledge in this area to examine peer interaction and the affordances it creates when emergent bilinguals engage with multimodal texts in disciplines to make meaning. Using discourse analysis of the interactions of a small group of third graders carrying out a project in science class, we explored how four emergent bilinguals collaborated to design, produce, and distribute traditional and alternative texts. We found that translanguaging and transmodal collaborative structures support learning processes and comprehension to make sense of and contextualize disciplinary knowledge. A dynamic and recursive translanguaging pattern emerges in which the introduction and contextualization of knowledge happens in Spanish, the interaction occurs mainly in English, and the creation is in both English and Spanish. We discuss the affordances of these collaborative structures for supporting students in science and promoting Spanish and student bilingualism.

Set in one of the least privileged neighborhoods of the US Southeast, this research project took a discourse analysis approach to construct a day-in-the-life case study. It illustrates how, during an after school storybook cooking class, a 7-year-old, multilingual, Mexican American girl navigated local linguistic microaggressions and extended microaffirmations to her peers. At the same time, she contested and critiqued societal power imbalances associated with whiteness. This study widens the corpus of scholarship that has primarily examined children’s sociodramatic play and literacy development in preschool settings. It also broadens the body of research that has predominantly focused on students’ linguistic dexterity and metalinguistic awareness in middle and high school contexts.

This study explores the potential of fifth-grade children to take up, mold, and complicate the superhero genre to engage issues of social justice and equity in critical and dynamic ways. Using critical discourse and visual analysis, I explore the ideological and political work in the comics four students of color created as part of this study. I argue that, when given the opportunity to embody their full selves in the creation process to fight against issues of injustice that matter to them, children are more likely to imagine beyond conceptions of the child (e.g., being apolitical) and take on activist stances. Moreover, teachers have the power to encourage children to see themselves and their voices as important tools in the fight for social justice. This study pushes us to consider that we, as adults, can either help to expand the possibilities available to children or continue to perpetuate the inequities that children experience on a daily basis due to misconceptions of what it means to be a child and what children are capable of.

Drawing on data from a yearlong qualitative study examining how children in a multi-age (6-9 years) classroom utilized technology to write across genres, this article examines the gendered negotiation and discursive uptake of expert in early childhood writing. Zeroing in on genius hour as a “site of engagement,” the author thinks with rhetorical genre studies and mediated discourse analysis to examine how four second-grade writers positioned themselves as “experts” across the nexus of school writing. Findings highlight how expert—both conceptually and in practice—became gendered and was interdiscursively traced through three threads: the relational, the historical, and the distributive. Through analyses of young students writing in situ, this article contributes new understandings to thinking about children’s navigation of genres, not only as rhetorical typifications of academic and disciplinary discourse but as unique social actions of curricular play and gendered uptake.

In this paper, we explore the gendered aspects of scientific controversy in the digital age. This project makes use of Leah Ceccarelli’s seminal work on manufactured scientific controversy by considering its implications for the discourse on GMOs and food additives published on digital food and lifestyle blogs. We perform a discourse analysis of several blogs to look at the ways that gendered online discourse and performance influences modern anti-science rhetoric, particularly that which emanates from the sphere colloquially known as crunchy living. We look at the ways the intimate and personal feminine style of digital platforms offer experiential knowledge as a substitute for science. In the current political climate of alternative facts and fake news, this study leads to broader implications about the impact of gendered discourse on the assessment of credibility in online sources.

Social justice is a framework that has been at the forefront of technical communication in recent years. While social justice is often applied in participatory studies, it can also feature in studies using quantitative methods. In this study, I use corpus-based critical discourse analysis to investigate the portrayal of migrants in the World Migration Reports, the flagship publication of the International Organization for Migration. I emphasize context to bring in the social justice framework in this analysis. This study finds that the World Migration Reports represent migrants within various topoi, with a particular focus on the topos of advantage and that of danger/threat.

Risk communication is traditionally authored by institutions and addressed to the potentially affected publics for whom they are responsible. This study expands the scope of risk communication by analyzing safety guides produced by a hypermarginalized group for whom institutions show no responsibility: full-contact, street-level sex workers. Using corpus-assisted discourse analysis and keyword analysis to reveal patterns of word choices, the authors argue that the safety guides exhibit characteristics and qualities of professional communication: audience adaptation, social responsibility, and ethical awareness. This area of inquiry—the DIY, peer-to-peer, extrainstitutional risk communication produced by marginalized people—widens technical and professional communication's approach to risk communication.

Scholars in discourse studies have defined legitimation as the justification (and critique) of powerful institutions and their practices. In moments of crisis, legitimation tactics often shift. This article considers how such shifts are incited by unauthorized information leaks. Leaks, I argue, constitute freshly available texts that reveal privileged institutional information presented in a specialized rhetorical style. To explore how leaks are harnessed by institutional critics, I examine the 2013 Snowden/National Security Agency (NSA) crisis. Combining corpus analysis with discourse analysis, I explore how Snowden’s NSA leaks affected the online writing of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). I also consider overlaps between the rhetorical patterns in the leaked NSA documents and those in the ACLU’s post-leaks writing. Findings from my analysis of legitimation and style categories suggest that, prior to the leaks, ACLU writers primarily used a character- and narrative-based style to delegitimize the NSA’s policies as illegal and secretive, and to push for their reform. After the leaks, though, the ACLU mainly used an informationally dense style rife with academic terms and vocabularies of strategic action, portraying NSA surveillance as massive and complex. As the documents moved from the NSA’s secret, technical discourses to public, critical discourses, the latter came to resemble the former rhetorically. These findings raise crucial questions about how critics can make use of leaks without necessarily relegitimizing institutional power.

In U.S. secondary schools there is an overriding emphasis on formulaic approaches to argumentative writing instruction in English language arts that tends to trivialize disciplinary norms of argument and evidence because of institutional pressure to bolster students’ test performances.  This paper seeks to provide an ethnographically-informed framework for understanding for whom, how, when, and to what extent it is possible for students to participate, through writing, in the study of literature as the central disciplinary content of English language arts. The corpus of data used in this study of an 11th grade International Baccalaureate (IB) classroom (26 students) consisted of classroom instruction (video-recordings and field notes) that occurred across an initial instructional unit (September 8th to November 3rd). Of particular importance is a summative writing assignment, teacher interviews and collaborative data analysis (with video clips), student interviews about instruction and their writing, samples of student writing, and related documents. We also analyzed two essays written by the two case study students in response to a writing assignment that the teacher, described as an IB “literary commentary with an unspecified topic” that she reframed as a literary argument. Discourse analysis of a series of events within instructional conversations revealed that rather than prescribed forms, the teacher offered “possible” writerly moves for her students’ arguing to learn. Consequently, her students enacted their writerly moves in a variety of patterns suggestive of disciplinary ways of knowing in English language arts rather than in a pre-set formula that they had learned in previous grades. In order to trace how the students enacted modes of participation (procedural display and deep participation) in disciplinary activity (literary argumentation) as writing practices and shifting writer identities  we also conducted a multi-phased and multi-layered ana

This article suggests that the framework of prison abolition in prison literacy studies should be developed through the relational potential of queer community literacy practices among incarcerated writers. To that end, the author presents findings from a critical discourse analysis of a newspaper by incarcerated LGBTQ+ writers. Three primary forms of audience address and rhetorical… Continue reading (Anti)Prison Literacy: Queering Community Writing through an Abolitionist Stance by Rachel Lewis

This article chronicles changes in the author’s service-learning pedagogy, concentrating on his recent attention to genre and its consequences for course design. The cumulative influences of rhetoric, discourse community theory, collaborative assignments, and genre theory are traced. The core claim, however, is that instructors should help students grasp the concept of genre as social action.… Continue reading Genre Analysis and the Community Writing Course by Thomas Deans

This essay considers the implications of using David Russell’s activity theory to re-conceptualize models of community service writing (CSW) that stem from discourse community theory. Here I argue that the notion of discourse community is of limited use to practitioners committed to CSW, because it leads students to adopt unrealistic expectations about their roles in… Continue reading From Discourse Communities to Activity Systems: Activity Theory as Approach to Community Service Writing by Michael-John DePalma

Writing assignments carry political ramifications even when they attempt neutrality; students should learn that all writing occurs within larger contexts of power. To accomplish this goal, I advocate instruction derived from practices of critical rhetoric, critical revision, and critical discourse analysis. Rhetoric education, based on Donald Lazere’s Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy, trains students… Continue reading Window Washing or War and Peace: Critical Rhetoric, Critical Revision, and Critical Analysis in Student Writing by Gae Lyn Henderson

This article presents data from a 10-month case study of a critical literacy writing group for parenting and pregnant young adults. The author focuses on the efficacy of the program to foster the critical literacy skills of two participants. Drawing on field notes and written artifacts and using case study and discourse analysis, the author… Continue reading Figuring Identities and Taking Action: The Tension Between Strategic and Practical Gender Needs within a Critical Literacy Program by Christopher Worthman

This essay explores student-authored ethnographies written by undergraduates in four sections of a service-learning course taught at Wayne State University in Detroit. I argue that the introductory sections of students’ ethnographic narratives provide particular insights into the relationship between the service experience, ethnographic inscription, and student subjectivities. Following a discourse analysis of student writing, I… Continue reading Into the Field: The Use of Student-Authored Ethnography in Service-Learning Settings by Thomas Trimble

Too frequently, representations of disciplinary writing foreground static notions of knowledge creation and literate practice in science and engineering. Rooted in discourse community theory, such representations present normative tropes of scientific practice that background notions of disciplinarity and obscure people’s lived experience and practice. Drawing on a case study of one woman, a civil and environmental engineer, this article argues for a lifeworld perspective of disciplinary becoming: a perspective that foregrounds notions of disciplinarity, lived experience, and literate practices as constantly mobile and in flux. The study suggests, specifically, that the woman’s work as an engineer cannot be separated from the people with whom she works, or has worked, and that her development as a writer extends beyond typical accounts of disciplinary enculturation. The author concludes by offering implications of this research for studies of disciplinarity and school science.

This article applies identity construction concepts to a professional and technical communication student intern’s use of agency as she negotiates a unique identity for herself within a state legislature. Following a literature review, the author highlights several of the intern’s key efforts to become part of this new governmental and legal discourse community, including learning legislature-specific genres, combatting the “totem-pole” hierarchy, making choices about appropriate professional behavior, socializing by creating an “entire family dynamic,” and making an effort to learn the culture of the legislature. These efforts are documented through the intern’s reflective, self-narratives and documents produced during the internship. Through this discussion, the author suggests practical implications for aiding students and newcomers as they transition to unfamiliar workplace communication environments.

Documenting and characterizing interactions between student interns and their mentors in the workplace offers perspective on student learning and enculturation that can help us introduce these ways of learning to students in the technical communication classroom, even before the internship. Three student intern conversations in the internship setting are the focus of this close discourse analysis, framed by 6-month-long case studies and Vygotsky’s learning theory. Results indicate that many similarities exist between classroom feedback and mentor feedback in the internship, but that differences in student agency may make negotiation important in the technical communication classroom.

Multimodal composing can activate literacy practices and identities not typically privileged in verbocentric English classrooms, and students’ identities as particular kinds of learners (e.g.,“visual artist”) may propel—or limit—their engagement in classroom work, including in multimodal composing. Although researchers have studied the ways multimodal projects can evidence literacy learning and have argued that identity is negotiated, improvisational, and hybrid, they have offered few sustained analyses of the processes by which identities evolve during and across multimodal composing tasks. By examining how students position themselves and one another as particular kinds of learners over time, researchers can better understand the ways in which multimodal tasks help students explore new skills and roles or reify old ones. Drawing on an approach to discourse analysis from the linguistic anthropology of education, we trace the pathways of three 12th graders’ learner identities across two events as they worked in a group to compose visual responses to literary texts for their English class. We examine how one student’s robust identity as an artist emerged in tandem with the devaluing of other participants’ artist identities. Seven weeks later, these positionings led her to act as the painting’s primary author and other students to act in increasingly perfunctory ways. We call for teachers and researchers to consider how students’ identities—interacting with factors such as the teacher’s expectations for group work and the affordances of particular media and materials for collaboration—drive students’ participation in and ownership of multimodal compositions.

In this Forum, colleagues remember and celebrate the life and legacy of Arthur Applebee, a former editor of Research in the Teaching of English and a leader in the field for many years, who passed away after a short illness on September 20, 2015. Intellectually, Arthur will be remembered for the sheer scope of his work over four decades, for his mentoring of several generations of scholars, for his contributions to research on literature and writing instruction in secondary schools, and for his theoretical work on “curriculum as conversation,” which has left an indelible mark on classroom discourse studies and English teacher education. More personally, Arthur’s friends and colleagues cherished his human kindness, generosity, humility, thoughtfulness, gentleness, equanimity, and affability.

This article reports on research addressing the role of incident reporting at the workplace as a textual representation of lean management techniques. It draws on text and discourse analysis as well as on ethnographic data, including interviews, recorded interaction, and observations, from two projects on workplace literacy in Sweden: a study in an eldercare facility and a study in a large factory. Analysis of the data set demonstrates striking similarities, both in the way incident reporting texts are structured and worded and in the literacy practices that contextualize them. Dominant characteristics in the texts are the absence of actors and the structured, process-based approach of problems and problem handling. The forms often generate conflicts in the ways workers are asked to textually represent an incident. In this article, we argue that lean thinking has penetrated texts and literacy practices of two considerably different workplaces, and this has a large impact on the way workers are instructed to think and act with regard to problem handling techniques.

Even as deficit model science communication falls out of favor, few studies question how written science communication constructs relationships between science and industry. Here, I investigate how textual microprocesses relate scientific research to industry practice in the Washington State wine industry, helping (or hindering) winemakers and wine grape growers in making research relevant to their work. Critical discourse analysis of a corpus of wine science texts suggests that textual microprocesses continue to enact a deficit paradigm: scientists as knowledge producers and the industry public as knowledge deficient. Through its extension of features of scientific discourse, the industry-oriented literature abstracts research practices from context which could aid in drawing relationships with industry practices. In aggregate, these texts suggest an opportunity to increase research relevance to industry practice by writing the research–industry relationship differently, recontextualizing research in practice.

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s writing textbook, “They Say / I Say,” has triggered important debates among writing professionals. Not included within these debates,however, is the empirical question of whether the textbook’s templates reflect patterns of language use in actual academic discourses. This article uses corpus-based discourse analysis to examine how two particular “moves” discussed in the textbook are realized in three large corpora of professional and student academic writing. The analysis reveals important differences between the textbook’s wordings and those preferred by student and professional writers. It also uncovers differences in use of “interpersonal”functions of language by experienced and less experienced writers. In offering this detailed analysis of academic prose, I aim to extend calls to recenter language in writing research and instruction. I conclude with implications for discussing academic argumentation with students.

There is considerable confusion in contemporary society when it comes to talking about race.Because of this confusion, race talk in schools can be fraught with difficulty, leading to problematic conversations, disconnections, and ultimately student disengagement. While studies in psychology, sociology, and linguistics have considered the role of race in discourse, there have been fewer of these investigations in English education, especially research on the teaching of literature. This article looks closely at the classroom talk of two veteran English teachers’ one an African American man, the other a White woman’ in a racially diverse high school, showing how teachers employ different strategies to navigate similarly fraught conversations. Taking an interactional ethnographic approach, I demonstrate ways that conversations about race that emerged from literature units in both classrooms opened up opportunities for some students to participate, while constraining and excluding others. The results of the study revealed that the two teachers navigated these dilemmas through tactical and strategic temporary alignments of actions and discourse, but in both classes, silence and evasion characterized moments of racial tension. As a growing number of researchers and teacher educators provide workshops and materials for teachers interested in classroom discourse studies, supporting new and experienced teachers’ investigations in this area may ultimately prove fruitful not only for teaching and learning, but also for race relations.

While a great many educational institutions now take part in the complex network of English language learning, this article asks what an institution expressly created to respond to and spur the transnational movement of English language learners, Intensive English Programs (IEPs), can reveal about how literacy is taught and learned transnationally. Specifically, I examine how the transnational political economy of English literacy is negotiated discursively at one US-based IEP (Northwest IEP) through teacher and student talk. From this discourse analysis, I suggest that, in addition to the difficult and time-consuming tasks of language learning, students in my study were involved in and recipients of another, much less visible type of literacy management: the ongoing valuing and defining of each other’s prior literacy-related knowledge vis-à-vis their and other students’ access to global Englishes. Thus, Northwest IEP did more than situate students in relation to privileged English literacy. That institution also served as a broker for the shifting status and subsequent privileging of global Englishes. This dynamic gives insight into how multilingual spaces come to mediate the broader transnational political economy of English literacy. Ultimately, this research shows the value of looking into institutes at the periphery of US higher education, which broadens the field’s linguistic terrain to situate US-based composition as one of many actors across the transnational landscape of higher education.

This article analyzes literature on university–workplace partnerships and professional writing pedagogy to suggest best practices for workplace mentors to mentor new employees and their writing. The article suggests that new employees often experience cultural confusion due to (a) the transfer of education-based writing strategies and (b) the employees' lack of cultural knowledge of the new workplace. The article then outlines implied mentoring strategies based upon this transfer and lack of cultural knowledge. The article also analyzes the literature on discourse community theory, activity theory, service learning, and internships, each of which also imply potential mentoring practices. These comprehensive best practices are also contextualized through social cognitive, community–cultural, and motivational–attitudinal components that writing mentors should consider when mentoring writing in the workplace.

Rhetorical use of citation is a means of indirectly reaffirming authority while avoiding the appearance of argument. It is therefore an especially useful strategy for people and institutions with compromised public images. This article compares the American Catholic bishops’ written citational patterns in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ presidential year voting guides issued before and after the clerical sexual abuse scandals. To investigate these changing citational strategies, work on entextualization by linguistic anthropologists is integrated with micro-rhetorical methods to provide a socially situated, fine-grained English language analysis of citation within a religious discourse community. Findings suggest that the bishops’ new citational patterns work to obliquely erase the authorial presence of the American bishops, to show deference to the Vatican, and to avoid challenges from lay Catholics. Religious aims are advanced through typographical and grammatical strategies that are specific to written discourse.

Current research suggests that emotional investment is essential for helping students critically engage in learning in the English language arts classroom. Yet, scholarship on the role of emotion in literary response has been limited, focusing chiefly on considerations of the merits of personal response—a focus that reflects dominant theories of emotion as located in the individual. Tethered to the personal, emotion has been conceptualized as a peripheral part of literary engagement—as something to be ignored, leveraged, or gotten beyond in an effort to move students toward more substantial textual engagement. This paper proposes that a sociocultural theory of emotion provides a new lens for considering how emotion engages students in literature learning. In this view, emotion is in the fabric of every classroom context, manifesting as “emotional rules” that have material implications for learning. Constructed using methods from Critical Discourse Analysis, the case study outlined in this paper demonstrates how emotional rules were perceived, taken up, and even transformed by one student, Nina, in two discussion contexts—a seminar circle and a literature circle—playing a central role in the work of literature learning in each context. Our findings advance scholarship on the relationship between response and emotion by suggesting that emotion cannot simply be invited in or left out of the literature classroom in the interest of moving students toward literary engagement, but instead is already fundamentally a part of literary engagement and must be noticed, interrogated, and sometimes disrupted in the interest of expanding interpretive possibilities.

This November issue of RTE once again contains the annual “Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English.” This bibliography includes abstracts of selected empirical research studies as well as titles of other related studies and books published between June 2013 and May 2014. Abstracts are only written for research studies that employed systematic analysis of phenomena using experimental, qualitative, ethnographic, discourse analysis, literary critical, content analysis, or linguistic analysis methods. Priority is given to research most directly related to the teaching of English language arts. Citations in the “Other Related Research” sections include additional important research studies in the field, position papers from leading organizations, or comprehensive handbooks.

English education researchers have established that whole-class discussions can support language and literacy learning. However, few studies have provided examples of whole-class discussions in which students explicitly reference their classmates’ ideas in order to elaborate different, but related, perspectives. Research that has described students’ uptake of their classmates’ ideas has typically portrayed disagreement either as an obstacle to student participation or as a step toward eventual consensus. In this article, I offer a sociolinguistic discourse analysis of two conversations in which a preservice teacher encouraged her urban, 10th-grade students to disagree. My analysis demonstrates the positive effects of the teacher’s use of indirect challenges and provocative paraphrases—features of the African American sociable conflict-talk practice known as The Dozens—to promote collaborative disagreement during whole-class discussion. I argue that teachers can promote collaborative disagreement in whole-class discussions by appealing tostudents’ home-cultural disagreement practices, which may already overlap with argumentation practices valued in school settings. I call for further research into the influence of teachers’ and students’ out-of-school discourses on discussions characterized by collaborative disagreement—a practice that is essential to ELA curricula and to participation in a democratic, literate society.

By examining how a student from Vietnam used English to interact with her peers in an English-medium secondary school in Singapore, this paper argues for an examination of language and literacy development through a cosmopolitan lens. Building on earlier research on cosmopolitanism (e.g., Campano & Ghiso, 2011; Canagarajah, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c; Hansen, 2010; Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2010), I illustrate how a broader understanding of cosmopolitanism in language and literacy education is timely in the wake of contemporary transcultural flows that characterize globalization, the emergence of a neoliberal order in education, and a pressing need to address educational inequities encountered by the growing number of immigrant learners whose home languages may not be valued in classrooms. The data in this paper, which include politicalspeeches, school documents, and classroom interactions, are part of a larger, yearlong critical ethnographic study and are subjected to microethnographic discourse analysis (Bloome & Carter, 2014). Through investigating how local interactional events are linked to broader events in wider Singapore society, I demonstrate how my Vietnamese focal student and her Singaporean peers were able to enact and develop a cosmopolitan outlook. Implications on language and literacy development are also discussed.

This study examines the global-local interplay of genre features in a select sample of nonprofit grant proposals from two particular sites—Nepal and the United States. Critically analyzing the carefully selected samples from both the sites on their own terms first and then in clusters (of Nepalese and American proposals) by exploiting the genre and discourse analysis theories and techniques published in genre, genre analysis, and grant proposal scholarship, this study attempts to examine the genre of nonprofit grant proposal in both comparative and non-comparative terms. While the study acknowledges that each instance of nonprofit grant proposal is unique, complex, and therefore non-generalizable, it does draw some broad generalizations about the similarities and differences in the rhetorical “moves,” organization, and/or composition strategies of grant writers from these two different geopolitical locations. The study finds that variations observed across samples and grant writers reflect the unique rhetorical situations of these writers, whereas uniformities have to do with the global circulation of Western genre forms in the rest of the world via global organizations like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund—which are also the major donors in developing countries like Nepal. And finally, the study reaffirms the fact that constraints like funding agencies' guidelines and reviewers' preferences have a considerable influence on genre features and forms. That has been the case with both the Nepalese and American proposals sampled in this study.

This paper discusses the teaching of writing within the competing and often contradictory spaces of high-stakes testing and the practices and priorities around writing pedagogy in diverse school communities. It uses sociospatial theory to examine the “real-and-imagined” spaces (Soja, 1996) that influence and are influenced by teachers’ pedagogical priorities for writing in two linguistically diverse elementary school case studies. Methods of critical discourse analysis are used to examine rich data sets to make visible the discourses and power relations at play in the case schools. Findings show that when teachers’ practices focus on the teaching of structure and skills alongside identity building and voice, students with diverse linguistic backgrounds can produce dramatic, authoritative, and resonant texts. The paper argues that thirdspaces” (Soja, 1996) can be forged that both attend to accountability requirements and also give the necessary attention to more complex aspects of writing necessary for students from diverse and multilingual backgrounds to invest in writing as a creative and critical form of communication for participation in society and the knowledge economy.

This study examines interaction between corporate representatives and critical consumers in today’s social media environment. Applying a microanalytical form of discourse analysis to a data set of corporate Facebook page discussions, the study contributes to a better understanding of the communicative resources that organizations use as part of their impression management (IM) for upholding their acceptability and promoting their credibility. The study also reveals the complexity of the work of corporate Facebook representatives, who need to align their individual IM with that of the organization while adjusting to the technologically mediated context.

As the scope of rhetorical inquiry broadens to cover intersemiotic and intertextual phenomena, scholars are increasingly in need of new, defensible analytic procedures. Several scholars have suggested that methods of discourse analysis could enhance rhetorical criticism. Here, I introduce a discourse-based method that is empirical, delicate, and adaptive to the complexities of intertextual and multimodal rhetoric. Specifically, I argue that rhetorical scholars can productively integrate systemic-functional linguistics, multimodal text analysis, and micro-intertextual comparison. I illustrate how this micro-rhetorical toolkit can be employed to investigate the recontextualization of written political discourse in video journalism.

Metonymy—the process of representing a concept with an associated element or feature—is a useful strategy for encapsulating or alluding to a larger idea without fully stating it. For metonymies to be successful, however, readers must recognize and be able to compensate for the information that has been omitted. Metonymic omissions can pose a barrier to readers, even in texts that are written in plain language, largely because metonymies operate indirectly: first, by prompting readers to infer information that is not provided; second, by constraining meaning rather than specifying it; and third, by requiring readers to possess the insider knowledge and values of a particular discourse community. These barriers are compounded by the fact that frequently used metonymies become so commonplace that their users may not even be able to detect, let alone address, these omissions.

This article examines the ways in which a multimodal text—a YouTube video on globalization and business—was mediated in two English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classrooms, and how these mediations shaped the instructor’s and her students’ meaning-making in specific ways. I first explore the complex multimodal discourses involved with this particular video and present my own reading of it. In addressing the instructor’s and students’ engagements with this video, I adopt a mediated discourse analysis approach to examine their classroom discourses that interact with the social circulation of a globalization discourse featured in this multimodal text. A conversation with the participating instructor, who articulates several issues including concerns about the possible politicization of her classroom if certain approaches to texts are used, is also presented and used to examine her subsequent approach with her students in the second class. I discuss the ways in which social actors take up discourses differently, and conclude by exploring the possible classroom practices that can address an increasingly multimodal curriculum.