Volume 36, Issue 2 -

This article interrogates the discursive relationship between school reform and redemption in the United States by examining the personal narratives of Teach For America corps members. After tracing the history of Teach For America and describing the rites of passage in which teachers’ “redemptive stories” are told, I analyze the generic arc that underlies them and show that it mirrors broader processes of in-group socialization. In doing so, I argue that Teach For America’s brand of redemptive storytelling – in addition to crafting individual identity, contributing to group cohesion, and enlivening performance at ritualized events – also affects organizational authority. As corps members master their stories of reform and redemption, paralleling the path to becoming “master teachers,” they participate in a process of “becoming” that reproduces in micro-scale the maturation of Teach For America. More profoundly, these transformations represent a distinct response to traditions of American confessional storytelling and the accountability-based education movement. Redemptive stories thus bind the socialization of the individual reformer to issues afoot more broadly in the province of education policy.

Studies on a variety of languages have observed a shift away from hypotactic, hierarchical structures towards paratactic, incremental structures, and have attributed this to language contact with English in translation. This paper investigates such a shift towards parataxis as the preferred structure of concessive constructions in German business articles. To this effect, a diachronic corpus method that has been applied to popular science articles in existing studies is adopted and applied to business articles, in an attempt to reproduce existing findings for this genre. This method is complemented by a corpus of manuscripts which allow to control for the effect of editing on the translated texts. Based on the analysis of hypotactic and paratactic translations of English concessive conjunctions between 1982/83 and 2008, I argue that hypotactic structures are indeed used less frequently in translated texts, but that this development is restricted to translated language. In non-translated texts, the use of hypotactic conjunctions has increased. The use of sentence-initial conjunctions, however, does seem to spread in this genre (as was reported for popular science), which may be further evidence for it to be a case of language change through contact in translation.

This paper investigates the nature of motivation in the context of a tertiary art and design studio through a multi-perspectival and mixed methodological study of situated text and talk. Drawing upon the analytical resources of linguistic ethnography, multimodal interaction, and functional linguistics, among others, the study finds that motivation in the studio, while perceived by the tutors in terms of the students’ willingness to complete required project work, is, on further examination, a more complex phenomenon, dynamically related to wider socio-institutional discourses and the students’ conception of their future selves. The paper concludes by reconceptualizing motivation in the art and design studio as a discursively constructed and contested phenomenon, intersubjectively realized across the trajectory of studio genres and inherently related to identity and power. The findings contribute to understandings of motivation, particularly within the context of art and design educational studies.

Using conversational data from an ethnographic study of a quilting guild, this article examines how narratives are used to negotiate the tension between maintaining solidarity and upholding group standards. The quilting guild, as a community of practice, provides an excellent context to investigate how narratives are used to construct and reinforce community practices. In this community, the socially situated activity, the quilted blocks on display, and their relationship to the narratives in the discourse are integral components of the interactional frame. The analysis specifically focuses on the role exemplar narratives play in negotiating the tensions between not criticizing other quilters and the group’s need to maintain quilting values and appropriate sewing skills. Through self-disclosure, exemplar narratives construct a less than perfect quilter. This self-portrayal acts to mitigate any implied criticism of intended recipient(s). Drawing on the sociocultural resources of common experiences and self-disclosure, exemplar narratives perform different interactional functions such as modeling accepted quilting practices, constructing both individual and group identities, and preserving an egalitarian floor. Thus, they are a strategic means to negotiate tensions between criticism and support necessary for participant learning in this community of practice.

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) in conjunction with a corpus-driven analytical methodology has evolved into a powerful qualitative and quantitative tool for deconstructing and studying political discourse. This study utilizes a corpus-driven CDA approach to examine the dynamics of power distance and the ideological stance in the context of Greater China, as conveyed in the 2013 Report on the Work of the Government of Mainland China and the Policy Address in Hong Kong. Concordancing software was used to generate frequency lists, co-selection patterns, and concgrams for detailed analysis. In particular, study examines differences in usage of the first-person plural pronoun we collocated with modal verbs and related lexical items. Concgrams in discourse analysis offer insights into the discursive practice of political actors in this unique political discourse genre. The findings show that the distribution and utilization of first-person plural pronoun we , and its interplay with other modal verbs and lexical items, comprising a specific “concgram,” have provided textual and intertextual evidence for the analytical results of conventional critical discourse analysis. The discussions support that a methodological synergy between corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis can serve as a powerful tool to deconstruct and analyze political discourses.

This paper attempts to make a corpus and cross-linguistic study of how the Pacific War is evaluated in US and Japanese history textbooks by drawing upon Systemic Functional Linguistics and the Appraisal System. The global pattern of evaluation in the data is such that the US history textbook gives more value to acts and things, creates an authoritative voice excluding alternative positions, and has a delicate construal for the extent of evaluation. By contrast, the Japanese history textbook displays a subjective affective stance and a flagged authorial voice strengthened by alternative positions. A detailed discourse analysis of the lexicogrammar in the Pacific War narratives of the US and Japanese history textbooks further shows different evaluation orientations for the construal of images of the United States and Japan. The US history textbook characterizes the United States as a state of military power and high morality for its military operations in the Pacific War while censuring Japan’s cruelty of attack, whereas the Japanese history textbook highlights Japan’s tenacity and voluntary acts on the battlefield while condemning the United States for its immorality of bombing.