Prosecution and radical discourse during the 1790s: The case of the Scottish sedition trials

This essay looks at the sedition trials in Scotland during the 1790s to examine how prosecution was exploited by radicals as a forum for political expression. As the government instituted a concerted campaign against radical activism, an increasing number of reformers faced trial on sedition and treason in this period. The courtroom emerged as an alternative venue for political discourse and this essay will explore some of the ways by which radicals challenged the dominant discursive and performative elements of trial proceedings. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Theory of mind and mental state discourse during book reading and story-telling tasks

This article presents three studies conducted in Canada and Australia that relate theory of mind (ToM) development to mental state discourse. In Study 1, mental state discourse was examined while parents and their 5-7-year-old children jointly read a storybook which had a surprise ending about the identity of the main character. Comments specific to the mental states of the story characters and discourse after the book had ended were positively related to children's ToM, and this was due to parent elaborations. Studies 2 and 3 examined children's mental state discourse during storytelling tasks, and in both, mental state discourse of children during narrative was concurrently related to ToM performance. While research has shown that mental state discourse of parents is related to children's ToM acquisition, the current research indicates that children's spontaneous use of mental state language examined outside of the interactional context is also a strong correlate.

Understanding sociocognitive space of written discourse: Implications for teaching business writing to Chinese students

Confronted with various issues in teaching business writing to Chinese students in New Zealand, this paper sees the need for bridging the gap between genre-based research and teaching in an intercultural context. Specifically, it develops an intercultural reflective model in the light of Bhatia's sociocognitive genre study as well as cross-cultural persuasion. As an important part of the model, New Zealand and Chinese experts' intracultural and intercultural reflections on business writing are solicited and compared and the theoretical implications for teaching and learning business writing are discussed. It has been found, through a case study of analysing English and Chinese business faxes, this model can offer an in-depth understanding about discursive competence across cultures, and provide a link between genre-based theory, teaching practice and professional expertise.

Ten Australian elementary teachers' discourse and reported pedagogical practices during cooperative learning

This article describes the types of discourse 10 Australian grade 4-6 teachers used after they had been trained to embed cooperative learning in their curriculum and to use communication skills to promote students' thinking and to scaffold their learning. One audiotaped classroom social science lesson involving cooperative learning was analyzed for each teacher. We provide vignettes from 2 teachers as they worked with groups and from 2 student groups. The data from the audiotapes showed that the teachers used a range of mediated-learning behaviors in their interactions with the children that included challenging their perspectives, asking more cognitive and metacognitive questions, and scaffolding their learning. In turn, in their interactions with each other, the children modelled many of the types of discourse they heard their teachers use. Follow-up interviews with the teachers revealed that they believed it was important to set expectations for children's group behaviors, teach the social skills students needed to deal with disagreement in groups, and establish group structures so children understood what was required both from each other and the task. The teachers reported that mixed ability and gender groups worked best and that groups should be no larger than 5 students. All teachers' programs were based on a child-centered philosophy that recognized the importance of constructivist approaches to learning and the key role interaction plays in promoting social reasoning and learning.

Highlighting hybridity: A critical discourse analysis of teacher talk in science classrooms

There is evidence that alienation from science is linked to the dominant discourse practices of science classrooms (cf. Lemke, J. L. (1990). Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. Norwood, NJ: Ablex). Yet, in secondary science education it is particularly hard to find evidence of curriculum reform that includes explicit changes in pedagogic discourses to accommodate the needs of students from a wide range of backgrounds. However, such evidence does exist and needs to be highlighted wherever it is found to help address social justice concerns in science education. In this article, I show how critical discourse analysis can be used to explore a way of challenging the dominant discourse in teacher-student interactions in science classrooms. My findings suggest a new way of moving toward more socially just science curricula in middle years and secondary classrooms by using hybrid discourses that can serve emancipatory purposes. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals. Inc.

The commentariat and discourse failure: language and atrocity in Cool Britannia

Recent terrorist events in the UK, such as the security alerts at British airports in August 2006 and the London bombings of July 2005 gained extensive media and academic analysis. This study contends, however, that much of the commentary demonstrated a wide degree of failure among government agencies, academic and analytic experts and the wider media, about the nature of the threat and continues to distort comprehension of the extant danger. The principal failure, this argument maintains, was, and continues to be, one of an asymmetry of comprehension that mistakes the still relatively limited means of violent jihadist radicals with limited political ends. The misapprehension often stems from the language that surrounds the idea of 'terrorism', which increasingly restricts debate to an intellectually redundant search for the 'root causes' that give rise to the politics of complacency. In recent times this outlook has consistently underestimated the level of the threat to the security of the UK. This article argues that a more realistic appreciation of the current security condition requires abandoning the prevailing view that the domestic threat is best prosecuted as a criminal conspiracy. It demands instead a total strategy to deal with a totalizing threat. The empirical evidence demonstrates the existence of a physical threat, not merely the political fear of threat. The implementation of a coherent set of social policies for confronting the threat at home recognizes that securing state borders and maintaining internal stability are the first tasks of government. Fundamentally, this requires a return to an understanding of the Hobbesian conditions for sovereignty, which, despite the delusions of post-Cold War cosmopolitan multiculturalism, never went away.