Discourse and religion in educational practice

Despite the existence of long-held binaries between secular and sacred, private and public spaces, school and religious literacies in many contemporary societies, the significance of religion and its relationship to education and society more broadly has become increasingly topical. Yet, it is only recently that the investigation of the nexus of discourse and religion in educational practice has started to receive some scholarly attention. In this chapter, religion is understood as a cultural practice, historically situated and embedded in specific local and global contexts. This view of religion stresses the social alongside the subjective or experiential dimensions. It explores how through active participation and apprenticeship in culturally appropriate practices and behaviors often mediated intergenerationally and the mobilisation of linguistic and other semiotic resources but also affective, social and material resources, membership in religious communities is constructed and affirmed. The chapter reviews research strands that have explored different aspects of discourse and religion in educational practice as a growing interdisciplinary field. Research strands have examined the place and purpose of religion in general and evangelical Christianity in particular in English Language Teaching (ELT) programmes and the interplay of religion and teaching and learning in a wide range of religious and increasingly secular educational contexts. They provide useful insights for scholars of discourse studies to issues of identity, socialisation, pedagogy and language policy

Discourse and the Linguistic Landscape

Research into the way that linguistic and other semiotic signs are displayed in public space has opened up a productive field for social language analysis over the last few years. Often focused on the policy implications – at both institutional and grass-roots level – of public signage, linguistic landscape research has, from the very beginning, engaged with issues of politics and ideology and thus, indirectly, discourse. In recent years it has also begun to theorise the ways in which semiotic artefacts and practices generate meaning by interacting in explicitly dialogical ways. To date however, theorising that is directed specifically at the relationship between linguistic landscape studies and discourse studies has been slight. This chapter explores the nature of this relationship by focusing on select case studies which exemplify the way that acts of linguistic and semiotic display in the public arena operate as key sites for social organisation and for political regulation and contestation. These short case studies also examine how meaning is generated through complex layering of contexts, the interplay between multiple signs, the narrative potential of landscapes and the dialogic possibilities presented by social media which allow local meanings to be up-scaled and reconfigured, thus pulling site-specific semiotic events into much broader discourses

Metaphor, Metonymy and Framing in Discourse

Metaphor involves the perception of similarities or correspondences between unlike entities and processes, so that one can experience, think and communicate about one thing in terms of another – lives as journeys, minds as machines, emotions as external forces, and so on. A consistent thread in the history of the study of metaphor concerns the potential of different metaphor choices to reflect and facilitate different ways of viewing topics or phenomena – a function of metaphor that is itself metaphorically captured by the notion of “framing.” The related phenomenon of metonymy, although less well studied in these terms, also facilitates framing in discourse. In this chapter, we review research on the framing power of metaphor and metonymy, with a particular focus on studies that are relevant to or directly concerned with the use of metaphor in discourse, broadly conceived. We begin with an overview of rhetorical approaches to metaphor as a tool for persuasion and of cognitive approaches to metaphor as a tool for thinking, including both theoretical and empirical studies. We review a variety of studies that have investigated the framing function of metaphor, and, to a lesser extent, metonymy, in authentic language use from a range of sources (e.g. politics, science and education) and using different qualitative and/or quantitative methods. Focusing on metaphor, where the evidence is most robust, we critically examine the relationship between, broadly speaking, cognitive and discourse-based approaches to metaphor. We go on to provide a concrete example of the framing function of metaphor in healthcare discourse, and show how cognitive and discourse perspectives can be usefully combined into a multilevel analytical framework that can, among other things, be used to make recommendations for professional practice and training

Poststructuralist Discourse Studies: From Structure to Practice

Poststructuralism has brought social, cultural and political theories into a productive exchange with methods and tools for analyzing text and talk. My contribution outlines the contours of poststructuralist discourse studies (PDS), which is an interdisciplinary field of discourse research inspired by poststructuralism. It gives an overview of poststructuralism, tracing its evolution and identifying its key questions. I then spell out the consequences of poststructuralism for discourse studies, where it has given birth to the new field of PDS. PDS critically relates to the structuralist, top-down tendencies that have characterized some of the pioneering “French School” and “Critical” strands in discourse studies. It defends posthumanist and antiessentialist views on power and knowledge. Perceiving language as a socially constitutive practice, it places emphasis on the critical and reflexive dimensions of discourse research. Situated at the interdisciplinary intersection of language and society, PDS aims to bridge structure- and practice-oriented strands of discourse research and to overcome the divisions between linguistics and other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities