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Purpose – This chapter presents an analysis of a researcher-led follow-up activity during an early childhood reading lesson that was aligned with a gradual release of responsibility (GRR) model. Particularly, the authors seek to understand how students used their language(s) in this lesson, how they described particular linguistic decisions, and how language could be further conceptualized in such events.

Design/Methodology/Approach – The authors develop a telling case (Mitchell, 1984) from the guided instruction portion of a lesson to make salient theoretical connections between metacognitive strategies taught in early literacy and metalinguistic knowledge theorized from the field of linguistic anthropology. The lesson was video recorded for interactional analysis. The video recording was also used to stimulate recall and allow students to reflect on their own language use.

Findings –Through the telling case, the authors use language socialization as a lens to understand the way students represent story retell with physical objects. Though some students do not use the school-based conventionalized form of retelling, they do engage in retelling by using a variety of other forms. The authors highlight through the case that the metacognitive strategy of story retell is distinct from the abstract linear, left-to-right representation of sequencing of events.

Research Limitations/Implications – This study suggests that further attention is needed to theorize the relationship between reading strategies and forms of representation in multilingual preschool contexts. In particular, the very notions of literacy and language need to be nuanced through conversations among multiple disciplines.

Practical Implications – Practitioners are encouraged to attend to the differences between metacognitive strategies that are useful for reading comprehension and the expected styles of representation. Teachers can consider leveraging the communicative repertoires of emergent bilingual students as they accomplish early literacy activities, thereby, potentially offering further scaffolds for learning reading strategies.

Originality/Value of Paper – This chapter brings nuance to the GRR model by demonstrating that there is a difference between the GRR of metacognitive strategies in reading instruction and the way they are represented through diverse semiotic repertoires.

On Justification: Economies of Worth (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991/2006) was a synthetic and comprehensive parsing of common goods, goods that could and had to be justified in public. In response to Bourdieu’s critical sociology, they rather provided a robust and disciplined sociology of critique, the situated requirements of justification. They refused power and violence as integral to the operability of justification. They emphasized the ways in which conventions of worth afforded coordination, not their constitution of or by domination. They refused to make either capitalism, or the state, into primary motors of social order. Indeed, they refused social sphere, structure, or group as the ground of the good. They emphasized the cognitive capacities of agents. There was no passion, no desire, no bodily affect in these justified worlds. There wasn’t even any account of production of value, of children, or of money. And while they recognized the metaphysical aspect of the good and even used Christianity as a template for one of their cités, they rigorously excluded religion. The theory was designed to analyze moments of controversy, not quiescence or quietude. In his subsequent work, Boltanski aimed to address these absences. In this essay, we examine how Boltanski sought to restore love, violence, religion, production, and institution across five texts: Love and Justice as Competences (1990/2012), The New Spirit of Capitalism, co-authored with Eve Chiapello (1999/2007), The Foetal Condition: A Sociology of Engendering and Abortion (2004/2013), On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation (2009/2011), and La «Collection», Une Forme Neuve du Capitalisme – La Mise en Valeur Economique du Passé et ses Effets (2014) co-authored with Arnaud Esquerre.

The purpose of this paper is to work toward more fully conceptualizing literacy practices as social by theorizing the combined relational and intellectual context for learning. This context is created through students’ and their teachers’ uses of language. In particular, the quality of language that creates this intellectual relational context is relational-keys that are inherent to any talk between people. Building upon Hymes (1974) conceptualization of key, relational-keys can be described as the emotional mood or spirit of a conversation, but they are much more than that per se. They are constitutive of the complex, multi-layered relationships that people have with each other, with themselves and with the material environment through their uses of language.

Drawing upon a classroom ethnographic study in a first-grade classroom and using discourse analysis of classroom interactions, the author uses data from instructional conversations to illustrate how students and their teachers collaboratively perform relational-keys.

Findings reveal that students and their teacher perform relational and intellectual stances toward reading and toward each other through relational-keys, that frame the act of reading and their experience of doing it together.

The concept of relational-key provides literacy researchers with another tool to analyze what happens in instructional conversations. It also provides teachers with a curricular resource to identify relational-keys that are enacted. Therefore, teachers are able move away from the enaction of relational-keys that contribute to subtractive schooling, and toward relational-keys that nurture empowering stances in students toward reading and their relationships.

This chapter explores some of the risks and constraints associated with defendants’ apologies during allocution at sentencing. It argues that defendants’ stigmatized institutional role identities in conjunction with the constraints imposed by the discursive context of allocution function to limit both the effectiveness with which defendants can speak on their own behalf and the kinds of things that they can say. Allocution has long been understood as a protection for defendants. This chapter proposes that the ideologies associated with this turn at talk have functioned to obscure the ways in which allocution preserves existing power configurations instead of challenging them.

To understand the phenomena of people revealing regrettable information on the Internet, we examine who people think they’re addressing, and what they say, in the process of interacting with those not physically or temporally co-present.

We conduct qualitative analyses of interviews with student bloggers and observations of five years’ worth of their blog posts, drawing on linguists’ concepts of indexical ground and deictics. Based on analyses of how bloggers reference their shared indexical ground and how they use deictics, we expose bloggers’ evolving awareness of their audiences, and the relationship between this awareness and their disclosures.

Over time, writers and their regular audience, or “chorus,” reciprocally reveal personal information. However, since not all audience members reveal themselves in this venue, writers’ disclosures are available to those observers they are not aware of. Thus, their overdisclosure is tied to what we call the “n-adic” organization of online interaction. Specifically, and as can be seen in their linguistic cues, n-adic utterances are directed toward a non-unified audience whose invisibility makes the discloser unable to find out the exact number of participants or the time they enter or exit the interaction.

Attention to linguistic cues, such as deictics, is a compelling way to identify the shifting reference groups of ethnographic subjects interacting with physically or temporally distant others.

We describe the social organization of interaction with undetectable others. n-adic interactions likely also happen in other on- and offline venues in which participants are obscured but can contribute anonymously.

This study aimed to investigate the impact of social networks on learning requests by Arab undergraduate EFL students.

Furthermore, both types of requests (i.e. direct and indirect) have been compared under the same condition. A total of 40 Saudi EFL learners participated in this study. Their scores in the pre-test and post-test were compared.

Results of the post-tests indicated that the experimental groups' performance significantly outscored the control groups. However, no significant difference was reported between the two experimental groups (i.e. direct and indirect).

Requests, as a component of pragmatics, have been investigated extensively in the literature to aid second/foreign language learning. However, little is known about the manner by which social networks could foster learning requests.

The past two decades have seen an increase in personal mobility; people are often transferred by their companies to divisions in other countries. As a result, interactions between members of different cultures are prevalent in organizations; such interactions can cause miscommunication and conflict unless people understand the meaning and assumptions underlying communicative behavior such as account‐giving. Unfortunately, there has been little conceptual or empirical work examining effective account‐giving and account evaluation in intercultural situations. In an attempt to fill this gap in the literature, this paper presents a literature review and develops a theoretical model of the relationships among culture, face concerns, account‐giving, and evaluation of accounts.

English instructors' pragmatic competence (PC) is an aspect of the overall communicative competence forming the basis of language instructors' knowledge. Their knowledge of pragmatics should not be overlooked when seeking to understand foreign language learners' communicative ability. This study aims to investigate the pragmatic awareness and teaching practices of non-native EFL instructors with different qualifications and from various cultural backgrounds in Saudi Arabia.

To obtain a broader perspective, this study adopted a quantitative research design. An online questionnaire, developed from Ivanova (2018) and Tulgar (2016), was accessed by 320 instructors at one English teaching institute in Saudi Arabia. The questionnaire consisted of demographic information about participants and 12 closed Likert-type questions.

The data analysis showed that most of the language instructors were aware of PC. However, some variations were evident in their views of the importance of pragmatics in teaching and learning and in their actual pragmatic teaching practices.

This study emphasizes the importance of pragmatic awareness for EFL instructors. It indicates that while non-native English instructors' academic levels and cumulative experience in teaching English play a major role in teaching, instructors have several challenges in teaching pragmatics and promoting students' awareness of pragmatics in this context. For effective second language teaching of pragmatics, instructors, managers and policymakers need to recognize the importance of pragmatics and competencies that students need to develop in EFL contexts.

To present sociocybernetic models of observers in interaction with the aim of encouraging reflection on what is good practice in human communication.

Foundational cybernetic concepts of “process and product” are drawn upon to develop models of “belief”, “meaning”, “truth” and “power”.

“Belief”, following Pask and Rescher, is modelled as a coherent, self‐reproducing system of concepts. “Meaning”, following Peirce, is modelled in terms of the pragmatic consequences of holding certain beliefs to be true. The concept of “truth” is modelled as “justified true belief”, the classic ideal of the “objective sciences”. “Power” is modelled as the pragmatic consequences of social interaction.

The paper invites the members of the sociocybernetics community to reflect on the reflexive nature of these models and to critically monitor and evaluate the quality of the communication within that community.