The notion of academic language or academic discourse has been booming in recent years, especially in (second) language teaching. This rise resembles the proliferation of Bernstein's ,elaborated' and ,restricted code' in the 1960s. Against this backdrop, this article first sets out to systematize and critically evaluate the existing research on academic discourse differentiating between communicative, epistemic and social functions of academic discourse. On this basis, an ethnomethodological understanding of academic discourse practices is put forward. This concept takes into account the situatedness of academic discourse practices and acknowledges their role in positioning practices and identity construction, which has been largely neglected. Finally, it is argued that empirical research on practices and norms of academic discourse is a prerequisite for reflecting on the acquisition and teaching of academic language.

The article deals with larger stretches of talk-in-interaction and argues in favor of a descriptive approach, which integrates the structural requirements of global organization, the special type of sequential orderliness within larger units as well as the genre-orientation of these units. Drawing on previous work in conversation analysis, discourse analysis and the sociological genre analysis, the article introduces GLOBE as an analytical tool which functionally links discourse units to conventionalized communicative purposes. GLOBE reconstructs the interactive achievement of genre-oriented discourse units in a three-branch analysis of jobs, devices and forms. The analytical potential of GLOBE is demonstrated in the exemplary genre-contrastive analysis of a narrative, an explanative and an argumentative excerpt. On the basis of the analyses of the three genres, the overarching constitution of genre-oriented global units is then explicated.

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Language, which plays a special role for the learning of mathematics, is investigated in this article for the specific discourse practice of explaining during whole-class discussions: On the one hand, explaining is a medium for learning since school cannot be thought of without communication. On the other hand, students at the beginning of secondary school are still in the process of language acquisition and are also still learning how to communicate mathematically. Thus, students are learning to explain in mathematics classrooms. This empirical study focuses on the overall question of how discourse competence, participation in classroom discourse, and mathematical learning opportunities are related. For that purpose, the approach of Interactional Discourse Analysis is introduced to mathematics education research and coordinated with the Interactional-Epistemic Perspective from mathematics education. The relevance of explaining is shown theoretically and empirically and a description is given of how limited discourse competence and limited epistemic participation proceed across situations.