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In the past four years, Australia has undergone a major change in the way it funds supports and services for people living with disability. Part of this change has, of course, occurred in the discourse of disability, and the emergence of the term “support” rather than “care” has been a feature of this discursive shift. In this paper we used aspects of Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) theory to analyse how the term “support” is used in a seven key policy and program documents related to disability written over a ten-year period. We aim to understand what is meant by the term “...

This thesis provides a linguistic theorisation of critical thinking manifested in student argumentative writing. Literature has indicated that much of the work on critical thinking focuses on concepts from the critical thinking movement. These concepts draw on philosophical, cognitive psychological and educational theoretical foundations, which are largely hypothetical and are often contested. The literature, however, has also fundamentally conceived argumentation as an underlying principle of critical thinking, which involves skills in constructing a coherent line of reasoning, evaluating and...

Objective: To create academic insights into how organisations approach and manage the maintenance of vendor-supplied information systems software. Approach: Three iterations of the Peircean Abduction methodology lead to the identification, conceptualisation, and application of new knowledge in vendor-supplied Information Systems (IS) maintenance deferral by means of undertaking a qualitative multiple-case study. The research goals are achieved through the appropriation and application of theories from Peircean Abduction and Systemic Functional Linguistics. Research questions: The following abd...

Argumentative writing is necessary for academic success at tertiary level in both Anglophone and EFL contexts. Being able to argue in English in academic ways, however, presents significant challenges for EFL students, particularly those with low English proficiency levels. Many EFL students have little experience with written academic argument genres and rhetorical writing styles in English, and insufficient understanding of the value of ‘objective’ evaluative writing. Despite the challenges faced by EFL students in learning to argue in English, to date little research has focused on trac...

Linguistics has embraced the functional and contextual turn but, when building tools for systematic contextual description, we have not made as much use as we could of our own functional traditions. Rather, we have largely relied on the metaphors of law and rule, which do not adequately capture tensions between consistency and variability in how language and context relate to each other. Our aim in this paper is to show the economy and practicality of representing context as a pathway through a network, drawing on the network technique for mapping systems of grammatical choice introduced by Mi...