In Western society "normal adolescence" is understood to be a biologically driven phase characterized by emotional turmoil and irrational behavior. Despite being discredited within academic literature this discourse persists both in formal theory and everyday use. Drawing on the case of diabetes care, I argue that the discourse of "normal adolescence" derives its power from its value as a vocab...

This paper reports the analysis of the online discourse of 44 sixth-grade students on an online platform in a Hong Kong primary school in the academic year of 2005-2006. A framework of two-step categorization is adopted to identify the patterns in a sustained knowledge building discourse, which integrates a category of four basic types of notes and SOLO taxonomy assessing the structural complex...

    A review of previous research on receptive skills among EFL learners  reveals that in contrast  to extensive research in reading, fewer studies have focused on the process  of listening comprehension in EFL contexts. The current study examines the effects of discourse signaling cues on Iranian EFL students' listening comprehension in academic lectures and also investigates the effect of tea...

A considerable amount of research has already established that academic writing is an interactive accomplishment, the success which largely depends on appropriate writer-reader relationship. Yet, nature this relationship been subject few studies. Also scarce are studies how writers address needs their readers and so, through elaboration, manage interactions with them. Drawing a corpus 68 articl...

A text parsing component designed to be part of a system that assists students in academic reading an writing is presented. The parser can automatically add a relational discourse structure annotation to a scientific article that a user wants to explore. The discourse structure employed is defined in an XML format and is based the Rhetorical Structure Theory. The architecture of the parser comp...