International students often turn to various sources for help, including writing center tutors, friends, faculty mentors, online sources such as Google translate, and proofreading and editorial services, among others. While receiving help from these sources is both understandable and somewhat expected, what type and level of help is appropriate or ethical is not always clearly defined. The current research study investigates perceptions of faculty and international students at one U.S. university as to what is ethical in academic writing help for (...) international students in 17 different scenarios. Findings suggest that students, far more than faculty, lacked certainty and agreement on whether certain help they may receive is ethical. The two groups’ views also varied on machine translation and the use of for-pay editors. Faculty, in general, had the least agreement on the use of machine translation and the use of a for-pay editing service for sentence- and discourse-level help and expressed that specific contexts and instructor’s expectations should be taken into consideration. Also, perceptions of students from East Asia showed notable differences. We argue that establishing and communicating clear guidelines concerning writing help should be part of any policy of academic integrity and present an “ethicality index” to help begin conversations as each institution, program, or faculty establishes the boundaries of ethical writing help in a specific context. (shrink)

This study analyzes two public speeches of two North-American Seventh-day Adventist women who oppose women’s ordination, in order to understand how they reconcile inequity perpetuated by their religious position that denigrates women. The two women in this study address the apparent disadvantage by reframing the issue and reordering their reality. Whereas one speaker creates other formidable sub-issues that make exclusion of women from church leadership imperative, the other speaker resorts to the elusive notion of female privilege. I demonstrate how their (...) discourse surrounding ministry and headship illuminates the fact that gender relations and religious convictions are ordered through permeable boundaries of arbitrary lexico-semantics. (shrink)

This article analyzes through a linguistic lens three official documents of the Roman Catholic Church on women’s ordination; it also identifies various discursive tactics utilized by text creators to reinforce gender hierarchy within the Church. Drawing from Fairclough’s three dimensional discourse framework, we examine the ideological message embedded in the linguistic features and the role each text plays within a matrix of power relations. Through close readings of Inter Insigniores: On the Question of Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood, (...) Ordinatio Sacerdotalis of John Paul II, and Women and the Priesthood, we demonstrate how discourse analysis can serve as a useful tool for identifying logical fallacies, inconsistencies, dilemmas, and manipulative tactics in religious discourses. (shrink)