How important is academic discourse that promotes new understandings and allows us to question what we know? In the current age of instant-messaging and Twitter®, does academic conversation have a place? Frankly, we think that academic discourse is more important now than ever. Our civil society functions best when students, instructors, neighbors, and communities come together to question the information before us, so that decisions and directions are viable, helpful, and ethical. Academic conversations help us sort through the important and not-so-important themes of our lives and how we are to live. Academic conversations show us other ways of viewing, and they grow our own repertoire of ideas. Academic conversations teach us wonder, tolerance, humility, and the important fact that the world is bigger than our backyard. Understanding the art and pragmatism of academic conversations requires a building of trust, a willingness to share, and a mind for critical thinking. Guidance for holding conversations with meaning and doing philosophy with learners is modeled, as well as how implementing classroom and collegial discourse benefits our society.

Conversing with others has given insights to different perspectives, helped build ideas, and solve problems. Academic conversations push students to think and learn in lasting ways. Academic conversations are back-and-forth dialogues in which students focus on a topic and explore it by building, challenging, and negotiating relevant ideas. In Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings authors Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford address the challenges teachers face when trying to bring thoughtful, respectful, and focused conversations into the classroom. They identify five core communications skills needed to help students hold productive academic conversation across content areas: Elaborating and Clarifying Supporting Ideas with Evidence Building On and/or Challenging Ideas Paraphrasing Synthesizing This book shows teachers how to weave the cultivation of academic conversation skills and conversations into current teaching approaches. More specifically, it describes how to use conversations to build the following: Academic vocabulary and grammar Critical thinking skills such as persuasion, interpretation, consideration of multiple perspectives, evaluation, and application Literacy skills such as questioning, predicting, connecting to prior knowledge, and summarizing An academic classroom environment brimming with respect for others' ideas, equity of voice, engagement, and mutual support The ideas in this book stem from many hours of classroom practice, research, and video analysis across grade levels and content areas. Readers will find numerous practical activities for working on each conversation skill, crafting conversation-worthy tasks, and using conversations to teach and assess. Academic Conversations offers an in-depth approach to helping students develop into the future parents, teachers, and leaders who will collaborate to build a better world.

Academic Discourse and Global Publishing offers a coherent argument for changes in published academic writing over the past 50 years. Demonstrating how published writing represents academics’ decisions about how best to present their work, their readers and themselves in the global context of a rapidly shifting university system, this book provides: An up-to-date reference on contemporary topics in specialist discourse analysis, current research methodologies and innovative approaches to the study of writing; New insights into conceptual and theoretical issues related to the analysis of academic writing; An accessible introduction to diachronic research in EAP and a case for the value of the diachronic study of texts using corpus techniques; A clear overview of how texts work in interaction and how they relate to evolving institutional and political contexts; Links between the practices of different disciplines and the environments in which they operate, as well as observations on the ways in which they differ. This volume is essential reading for students and researchers of EAP/ESP and Applied Linguistics and will also be of significant interest to academics and students looking to have their work published.

In Why Debate: Transformed by Academic Discourse, Shawn F. Briscoe and a diverse group of individuals introduce readers to academic, competitive debate in our secondary schools and institutions of higher learning.Over the course of twenty chapters, eighteen authors address the role of academic debate on educational development, interpersonal relationships, career and professional lives, and society. Misunderstood or unknown by outsiders, academic debate has far reaching impacts upon our world. This collection of essays, highlights the significance the activity has, not just on those who engage in it, but upon people everywhere. Competitive debate serves as a foundation for growth as students learn to navigate through society, form relationships, and develop the skills they need to succeed in college and beyond. Those who participate in the activity develop skills and dispositions that help them succeed in their chosen professions. Ultimately, debate makes us aware of what needs changed in the world; and it gives us the ability to effect meaningful change.

In this innovative work on culture and education, Pierre Bourdieu and his associates examine the role of language and linguistic misunderstanding in the teaching contexts of higher education.

How important is academic discourse that promotes new understandings and allows us to question what we know? In the current age of instant-messaging and Twitter(R), does academic conversation have a place? Frankly, we think that academic discourse is more important now than ever. Our civil society functions best when students, instructors, neighbors, and communities come together to question the information before us, so that decisions and directions are viable, helpful, and ethical. Academic conversations help us sort through the important and not-so-important themes of our lives and how we are to live. Academic conversations show us other ways of viewing, and they grow our own repertoire of ideas. Academic conversations teach us wonder, tolerance, humility, and the important fact that the world is bigger than our backyard. Understanding the art and pragmatism of academic conversations requires a building of trust, a willingness to share, and a mind for critical thinking. Guidance for holding conversations with meaning and doing philosophy with learners is modeled, as well as how implementing classroom and collegial discourse benefits our society.

Academic Writing and Reader Engagement offers a concise linguistic description of the use and functions of questions in English, French and Spanish and discusses their value to the teaching of academic writing. This book: Enables a better understanding of how writers engage readers in academic writing in English, French, and Spanish and where each language behaves similarly or differently; Explains how authors express opinions, organise discourse and create relationships with readers via questions in their academic writing and the various functions questions perform; Brings together research on corpus and contrastive linguistics, highlighting how these two fields can support one another; Offers a thorough investigation of reader engagement markers from a range of linguistic perspectives and considers how knowledge of these markers could be applied to the teaching and learning of academic writing in each language; Employs corpus data totalling approximately 1.2 million words from all three languages to illustrate the varying roles and representations of questions in each language. Providing an invaluable resource for scholars learning to communicate successfully within their academic community, as well as teachers of English, French and/or Spanish for academic purposes, this book is key reading for students and researchers of academic discourse, contrastive linguistics and corpus linguistics.