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This article presents a linguistic analysis of Australian Acknowledgements of Country, an ancient Indigenous practice now increasingly prevalent in Australian public life. Acknowledgements of Country are typically spoken at the beginning of events by either Indigenous or non-Indigenous people. While celebrated as a practice that gives voice and primacy to Country, Indigenous peoples and their cultural practices, they have also attracted criticism for being tokenistic and minimising the severity of the genocide and continuing exploitation of Indigenous peoples. Supporting a body of work that cr...

Critical thinking has been subject to various theoretical interpretations. Despite the differences, it has been perceived to principally build upon argumentation skills. One of the skills involves anticipation of the putative reader. This paper establishes an insight into how this knowledge can be grounded for timely reader anticipation to evidence the skills in thinking critically when constructing a written argument. It draws on the interaction of interpersonal meaning patterns from the discourse semantic level in selected sets of low and high achieving texts, with a focus on the macroThemes...

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 “...

Learners' perceptions of their teachers' practices have received considerable research attention due to their impact on both teacher development and students' learning outcomes. However, students' perceptions of their teachers' knowledge have rarely been explored. This qualitative study investigates: 1) students' perceptions of changes to their teachers' knowledge of subject matter (SCK) and pedagogical content (PCK) about writing instruction, and 2) how such changes impact students' (perceptions of good) writing outcomes. To achieve these aims, six expe...

Understanding what transpires in therapeutic conversations is as complex as the humans who are engaged in them. Inspired by the natural sciences, mainstream research in psychotherapy has taken up a positivist epistemology and strives for quantification and verification to produce evidence of the effectiveness of an approach. This paper explores an alternative foundation for therapeutic practices which has implications for how we do research. First, we present some ideas from process philosophy and dialogical perspectives. In particular we return to the ideas of Henri Bergson who understood cha...