Cynthia Wallat

Perspectives on Production of Written Educational Policy Reports.

The aim of this article is to relate language research to policy work, a relationship that has been implicitly recognized by educational researchers in their attempts to address unresolved issues in the production and utilization of written policy reports. A number of US educational policy researchers have attempted to influence the way in which policy reports can and might be produced by explicating product features that discourse researchers gloss as variability in format/style, scope, medium, and audience. Their attempts to be responsive to the ‘meanings’ of educational policies for diverse targets and interest groups raise difficult questions, including, how we can develop policy products (presentations of words) that take into account variability in oral and written policy arena processes (multiple expectations about style; multiple expectations about ‘valuable’ information; multiple interpretations and meanings of actions). After introducing examples of these calls for attention to product and proce...

Exploring multicultural discourse in information technology documents

Purpose – The primary purpose of this paper is to illustrate strategies college students learn to practice in their analysis of multicultural documents located through use of the internet.Design/methodology/approach – Students explored a variety of meanings for diversity within and across texts readily available in public databases. Using linguistic devices (forms and functions of discourse) as language resources, and following a propositional analytic scheme, students compiled samples of text from online documents.Findings – Evaluation of these compilations at the end of the course demonstrated that students can use conceptualizations of language forms and functions to identify representations of multicultural, and can identify attributions of the phenomenon of diversity using conceptualizations of science as propositional structures.Originality/value – The value of this conceptual paper has been articulated: In what ways can projects that attempt to connect multicultural education and technology facilit...