Volume 40, Issue 3 -

In the sentencing of murder cases in England and Wales, it is required by law that judges must take into consideration the factors listed in sentencing laws and guidelines (henceforth statutory factors). However, judges also have the discretion to include factors that are not listed in such laws or guidelines (henceforth non-statutory factors). This paper explores judges’ positioning towards legal constraints and judicial discretion in sentencing by applying the Appraisal framework to analyse statutory and non-statutory factors in the sentencing remarks for a randomly selected murder case. The major analytical findings are that, with regard to statutory factors, attitudes are implicit and are mainly presented through heteroglossia, while, with regard to non-statutory factors, attitudes are explicit and are mainly presented through monoglossia. These different appraisal features of statutory and non-statutory factors reflect the constraints of sentencing laws and guidelines on the judge’s sentencing practice, and the judge’s full play of judicial discretion in the sentencing of this case. It is expected that findings of this study could add to current understanding of sentencing practice, while its analytical procedure could facilitate appraisal analysis of more sentencing remarks, which would, in turn, complement socio-legal studies on sentencing practice.

This article reports on a research project that uses two innovative heuristics to examine the changes that texts – produced to disseminate new scientific knowledge – undergo when they travel across space and time. A critical analysis of such transformations would enhance our understanding of the processes involved in knowledge dissemination and inform the practice of communicating scientific knowledge to a variety of audiences. Based on our study of 520 closely linked science and science-related sources collected over 12 months in 2016, we argue that when scientific knowledge is re-contextualized to be disseminated to different audiences, it is not simply rephrased or simplified to make it more accessible. Rather, it also undergoes transformational processes that involve issues of social power, authority and access that require new analytical tools to surface more clearly. We report on the methodology of the study with a particular focus on its heuristics, and the transformations that result from a critical analysis of the data collected. We finally discuss a number of theoretical and practical implications in relation to contemporary practices for re-entextualizing scientific knowledge.

An election radio phone-in program is designed for questions and answers, thus providing a context for direct interaction where lay-participants can engage with politicians’ responses. The current study aims at examining the third position that follows a question-answer sequence in a phone-in conversation, when radio hosts and/or callers evaluate politicians’ answers. Previous research has shown that radio hosts may offer a comeback to the caller, terminate the call, or ask their own question; and that a caller may come back on their own initiative. The aim of this article is to discover if there are patterns that underlie this diversity in the third position in radio phone-in conversations. The data consist of 4 hours and 20 minutes of transcribed conversations from election phone-ins from the Leading Britain’s Conversation (LBC) radiobroadcast prior to the 2015 general election. Using Conversation Analysis, this study looks at the sequential context and the substantive content of utterances to examine if the design and the content of the question and answer have bearing on the third position. The findings show that hosts either offered a comeback to callers or terminated the call right away when the politician’s answer was non-evasive and lacking opposition; that hosts or callers pursued an answer when evasion and opposition were apparent, and that callers pursued only when they showed oppositional stance taking in the questioning position.

In this paper, I draw on recent work on small stories that has been proposed as a counter-move to the dominant paradigm of big stories. Small stories are fragmented, heavily co-authored and open-ended tellings, and have proved a prime site for the joint drafting of identity positions in concrete interactional sites. The context in which the use of small stories is examined in this study is a group of three 20-year-old Greek women, who portray themselves as best friends. This friendship group was studied ethnographically in Syros (Greece) between 2014 and 2015, and data collection involved 10 hours of audio-recorded conversations, as well as field-notes. For the analysis of the participants’ small stories, this paper draws on positioning analysis and conversation analysis vis-à-vis small stories research as a framework to study identities-in-interaction. In particular, it employs the model of positioning in the fine-grained micro-analysis of a co-authored ‘small story’ about relationships with men. It demonstrates how the deferrals of telling and the refusals to tell are as integral a part of the analysis as the actual telling, since they allow us insights into the teller’s contradictory views about big issues and large identities. Moreover, the findings show how the teller manages the participation framework in cases of narrating difficult topics and ambivalent identities.

Expatriate blogs are personal websites in which individuals share their experiences of relocation and life in a different country, not solely for the benefit of their readers but also for their own benefit. As such, they constitute sites of identity construction in phases of personal transition, afforded by the linear nature of blogging. This paper illustrates how expatriate bloggers discursively authenticate identity. Drawing on tactics of intersubjectivity, the analysis explores twelve personal blogs by Anglophone foreign nationals who have moved to England. Authentication is achieved, firstly, through displaying expertise pertaining to life abroad. This at the same time legitimizes expatriates’ sharing of the everyday experiences, and indeed they portray themselves as providing deep insights and unadorned accounts. Additionally, identity is authenticated through discourses of personal fulfillment. The authentication of expatriate identity is thus closely linked to bloggers’ legitimizing of their own contributions. These findings add to research on discursive identity construction in personal negotiations of relatively privileged migration. They further make a theoretical contribution to the tactics of intersubjectivity as well as more generally to explorations of identity and authentication in online environments.

Language teachers’ narratives of professional and personal experience have been shown to support sense-making, problem-solving, and the forging of personal connections, as well as to aid in developing their identities as language teachers. As language teacher education increasingly moves online, examining how teacher-learners engage in the sharing of professional experiences through narratives in these spaces is of paramount importance. This paper traces narratives of professional experience across 1,089 discussion posts shared by 10 Master’s students throughout one graduate-level online course, analyzing participants’ forum discussions to understand the functions of these narratives for the teacher-learners engaged in the course. Findings demonstrate how narratives of professional experience served to warrant individuals’ claims about topics related to multilingual writing pedagogy and teaching multilingual learners in general, positioning them as competent experts, often by presenting narrative events as something experienced time and again. Finally, this study considers how narratives of professional experience produce and reproduce a particular view of teachers’ role in educating language learners, collaboratively building on one another to preclude alternative stances, even when making potentially controversial claims.