Andrew S. Ross

University of Canberra · Faculty of Education

This article considers how readers engage with Sylvia Plath’s poetry collection Ariel (1965) – deemed as particularly ‘difficult’ – on Goodreads, in the context of online amateur reviewing. George Steiner’s (1978) fourfold typology of difficulty (contingent, modal, tactical and ontological) informs our approach and leads us to explore the ways in w...

This article explores children's and adults’ online fandom and engagement with the children's animated television programme Bluey. This Australian cartoon has proven extremely popular worldwide with its primary recipients, that is children, and has also received significant attention and positive evaluation from parents, who – we suggest – offer a...

The devastating 2019–2020 Australian bushfires attracted significant activity on social media, both in Australia and worldwide. We use corpus-based discourse analysis to explore the impact of this significant environmental crisis event on climate discussions on Australian Twitter, with a focus on discursive struggle and (de-)legitimation. We examin...

This paper explores language in sport. It draws on systemic functional linguistics to map variations in language as coaches and players change situation, from setting up drills and giving feedback to calling for the ball during the intensity of play. In particular, it explores grammatical and phonological shifts as coaches and players move more tow...

Focusing on the anti-extradition bill protests in Hong Kong, this article presents an analysis of Twitter posts adopting the hashtags #antiELAB, #NoChinaExtradition and #HongKongProtests. The analysis explores the public narrative among the collective identity of Hongkongers opposing the extradition bill as events unfolded during mid-2019 in Hong K...

‘New media’ such as social media content-sharing apps and podcasting platforms have democratised mass media by enabling producers to disseminate content that is otherwise of limited interest to mainstream broadcast media, though may be of great interest to members of nuanced social worlds. Producers of bespoke sport-related content have recently ha...

The diplomatic relationship between the USA and Iran has long been fraught and is characterised by various conflicts and the implementation of economic sanctions. It can be argued that the relationship became even more hostile after Donald Trump was elected president of the US. Trump’s sentiments towards Iran were made public through his behavior o...

With a focus on the online phenomena of scamming and scambaiting, this article explores users’ communicative activities on Reddit’s r/scambait subreddit. Drawing on a representative corpus viewed through grounded theory, we establish the basic categories of posts and then unpack those further to reveal the deceptive practices being undertaken by bo...

The growth of the Internet has seen the emergence of elaborate examples of cybercrime in the form of ‘scams’. Alongside this, a resistance has also developed, with ‘scambaiters’ engaging in complex and deceptive scenarios to waste scammers’ time and educate others about online scams. This has been facilitated by the evolution of new media platforms...

This paper explores how ideological positions associated with food are construed multimodally in Instagram posts produced by everyday social media users. Discourse about food choices is an important site for revealing syndromes of values that characterise the ideological positions that are embedded in everyday life. An example of a highly valued fo...

This paper decodes the compositional features of President Trump's letter to Speaker of the House-Democrat Nancy Pelosi-published on December 17, 2019 1 , on White House stationery, regarding his possible impeachment. This unprecedented document provoked a viral reaction in the media due to the language the president used in its configuration. This...

In this article we consider the discursive production of status as it relates to democratic ideals of environmental equity and community responsibility, orienting specifically to food discourse and ‘elite authenticity’ (Mapes 2018), as well as to recent work concerning normativity and class inequality (e.g. Thurlow 2016; Hall, Levon, & Milani 2019)...

The hashtag #secondcivilwarletters emerged after conservative media personality Alex Jones tweeted that Democratic Party supporters were planning a Second Civil War. The resultant tweets mimicked the style of American Civil War soldiers' letters home, delivering often scathing commentary and critique of contemporary U.S politics, in particular in o...

The sweeping tide of populism across the globe has given rise to isolationist sentiments that call for the closing of national borders and a return to nativist roots. This has been most evident in Britain in terms of the controversial vote to exit the European Union (EU) during the 2016 referendum (to Leave or Remain) and more recently with the lea...

The objective of this article collection is to further advance inter- and multi-disciplinary inquiry within the broad domain of sports discourse and participation concerning communities increasingly influenced by new media technologies and platforms. In pursuit of this objective, this collection showcases articles from diverse academic fields and g...

The rise to the US Presidency of Donald Trump has been accompanied by the emergence of a new political rhetoric, one that is most frequently observed on the social media platform Twitter. Although Twitter has been a feature of political campaigns and communication for several years now, the public has not been exposed to the de-professionalised, in...

The construction of a wall along the US/Mexico border was one of the main political platforms upon which the 2016 US presidential election campaign was fought. Ahead of the upcoming 2020 US presidential election, and with the border wall still not yet built or funded, this article uses the authorisation component of Van Leeuwen’s (2007) framework f...

Football fan participation within the context of the English Premier League (EPL) has diversified through the rise of fan channels hosted on YouTube. As a pioneer within this participatory new media landscape, AFTV is the most prominent example within the genre having amassed over one million YouTube subscribers. Drawing data from the comments post...

This article explores a selection of the tweets of President Donald Trump, specifically in relation to his use of negativity as a rhetorical political strategy. The study is guided by a corpus-based comparative keyword analysis and the analytical framework of APPRAISAL, from Systemic Functional Linguistics, which is concerned with the language of e...

Media frames have been applied to news information for decades to influence the manner in which news is both delivered and interpreted. However, media frames have tended to focus on traditional news media channels, but the emergence of new media platforms now necessitates a recalibration of how media framing is understood in relation to media and c...

In July 2018 the Twitter hashtag #secondcivilwarletters began trending as part of a collective response to conservative media personality Alex Jones’ warning that Democratic supporters were planning to launch a Second Civil War on Independence Day. The response consisted of tweets in the form of parodic letters written as though they were from the...

The affordances of social media platforms have generated an intensified focus on the daily lives and activities of individuals. Instagram is an extremely popular platform, particularly in relation to the ‘selfie’, which has led to a growing body of research in relation to selfie types and the different subjective and intersubjective relations they...

Social media is now a central communication centre within social worlds bound by particular leisure interests. In the digital age, leisure participants are able to generate and share bespoke, archival content and thus project nuanced messages regarding leisure experiences to their social networks. Adopting an interpretive approach to analyzing mult...

When conservative media personality and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones warned of an impending Second Civil War to be initiated by Democrats, he instigated a viral hashtag on Twitter – #secondcivilwarletters – which drew tweets of political commentary and critique in a style mimicking war letters from the American Civil War. Using a sample of these...

This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which digital communication facilitate and inform discourses of legitimization and delegitimization in contemporary participatory cultures. The book draws on multiple theoretical traditions from critical discourse analysis to allow for a greater critical engagement of the ways in which va...

During the National Policy Institute’s national conference in Washington D.C on Saturday November 19th, 2016, Richard Spencer, the President of the institute and the man believed to have popularized the term alt-right, delivered a speech in praise of the election victory of President Donald Trump. Spencer ended his speech proclaiming, “Hail Trump!...

During the National Policy Institute’s (NPI) 2016 annual conference, Director Richard Spencer gave a speech in praise of the election victory of President Donald Trump. Spencer concluded his address proclaiming, “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail Victory!” after which several audience members were recorded performing Nazi salutes. Three days after...

Twitter is increasingly being utilized within the sociopolitical domain as a channel through which to circulate information and opinions. Throughout the 2016 U.S. Presidential primaries and general election campaign, a notable feature was the prolific Twitter use of Republican candidate and then nominee, Donald Trump. This use has continued since h...

Research into the emotional experiences of language learners and their impact upon the language-learning process remains relatively undernourished within second language education. The research available focuses primarily on emotions experienced within the classroom, rather than in the daily lives of learners within various social contexts. This ar...

Framed against a backdrop of complex intergroup dynamics and the legacies created for foreign language education, the current article tests three hypotheses which explore the efficacy of direct contact encounters between Japanese university students and ‘idealized’ native-speaker English teachers. As antecedents to positive language learning outcom...

While mainstream psychology has made significant advances into the understanding of personality, applied linguistics research has offered a more muted response (Dörnyei and Ryan, 2015) despite Bandura (2001, p. 10) declaring that self-efficacy beliefs represent ‘the foundation of human agency’. The study documented within this article therefore exa...

The incorporation of metaphors into everyday language use has formed the basis of scholarly investigation and analysis for decades. Particular attention has been given to conceptual metaphors, which are seen as essential tools for individuals to interpret and process various ideas and experiences. Within the milieu of metaphorical speech, metaphors...

Online academic skills support in higher education and the ways that students use such support is seldom researched. “Ask a Question” is part of one Australian university’s online academic support service for students to upload assignment documents for review or to ask a specific question about their work. With a view to fine-tuning the online acad...

Online academic skills support in higher education and the ways that students use such support is seldom researched. "Ask a Question" is part of one Australian university's online academic support service for students to upload assignment documents for review or to ask a specific question about their work. With a view to fine-tuning the online acad...

The Australian government’s decision to turn away a Norwegian vessel with 438 asylum seekers on board became a national political issue and triggered a response from the hip-hop group The Herd in their track ‘77%’. Utilising Androutsopoulos’s (2009) framework of the three spheres of hip-hop discourse, this study explores how dissatisfaction and dis...

Originating from youth cultures in the South Bronx during the late 1970s, the performative musical genre of hip-hop represents “a form of rhymed storytelling accompanied by highly rhythmic, electronically based music” (Rose, 1994, p. 2), one frequently portraying narrative experiences born from socioeconomic desperation, structural oppression, and...

This book adopts a sociolinguistic perspective to trace the origins and enduring significance of hip-hop as a global tool of resistance to oppression. The contributors, who represent a range of international perspectives, analyse how hip-hop is employed to express dissatisfaction and dissent relating to such issues as immigration, racism, stereotyp...

With foundations in the evolutionary work of British biologist Richard Dawkins and situated at the nexus of language, society, popular culture and communication science, Internet memes represent “artifacts of participatory digital culture” (Wiggins and Bowers, 2015: 1886). Furthered by the “relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic e...

Within applied linguistics, understanding of motivation and cognition has benefitted from substantial attention for decades, but the attention received by language learner emotions has not been comparable until recently when interest in emotions and the role they can play in language learning has increased. Emotions are at the core of human experie...

Within the field of applied linguistics, research into language learner motivation has been high on the research agenda for some years. At the same time, another psychological construct – emotion – has been the victim of significant neglect, and is almost absent from the same research agenda. This review first traces the development of motivation r...

English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education within the context of Japan is firmly underpinned by sociohistorical constructions of racial difference and racial hierarchies that have considerable influence on contemporary student and institutional attitudes. Embracing these sociohistorical foundations, this article adopts experimental procedures to...

One of the most active and culturally bound modes of stereotype perpetuation, particularly concerning the unknown or less familiar other, is through various forms of media - “[i]n constructing social reality, mass-mediated information generally plays a greater role in domains where we do not have direct experience or other means to test its veracit...