This article reports on key aspects of a theory generative study into social presence in text-based online learning environments. The focus of the article is the nature of social presence as experienced by online learners in those environments. Employing a collective case study design, the study accessed online learners' experience-based heuristic…

Investigates the conventions that govern telephone communication through answering machines, both domestic and institutional. Finds that talk on answering machines is highly structured and highly routinized. Identifies the internal structures of both callers' contributions and machine contributions. (SR)

In the context of low fertility and Australia's ageing population, a national longitudinal telephone survey, "Negotiating the Life Course" (NLC), asks women about their childbearing intentions. This paper uses conversation analysis (CA) to examine interaction between an interviewer and respondents on one NLC question about the likelihood…

A case study examined the processes by which girls and boys in their first month of primary school assume particular, highly gendered subjectivities within the school setting. Subjects, 28 children of diverse multicultural origins entering a suburban primary school in a large regional center in southern Victoria, Australia, were observed in the…

Talk remains by far the most used medium of instruction and classroom action. Classroom talk is typically dominated by triadic dialogue or an I-R-E (Initiate-Response-Evaluation) pattern of talk noted in the literature as consistent across grades and subjects. Studies seem to indicate that teachers utilize traditional forms of talk, even though…

Examines the language strategies used in everyday explanation by young heterosexual Australian college students to attribute blame for the transmission of HIV. Finds that speakers blamed outgroups more than ingroups; blamed outgroups at higher levels of responsibility than ingroups; but did not use more justifications for ingroups. Notes overt…

An ethnomethodological approach was used to analyze the organization of talk, the leader-student interaction, and resultant social order during group discussion among 2 male leaders and 15 ninth-grade Australian boys participating in a school-sponsored outdoor experience. Results focus on how the leaders structured the interaction and regulated…

A study examined from a feminist poststructuralist perspective the discourses available in a classroom using a critical pedagogy, based on a belief that teaches need to make it possible for their students to question the social world constructed in texts. The teacher of an Australian junior primary classroom (with students age five to eight) took…

Classroom dialogue is an important influence on students' learning, making the structure and content of dialogue important research variables. An analysis of two sample classroom dialogues using the Thematic and Structural Analysis (TSA) Technique shows a positive correlation between the quality of dialogue structure and the level of student…

A study identified some implicit concepts, knowledge, and skills that a seemingly standard adult literacy and numeracy "lesson" contains. Conversation analysis was used to show instances of how adult numeracy is embedded in adult language and literacy. The "conversation" was a transcript from an adult literacy class for…