This article examines how national and immigrant identities are discursively constructed through the use of oral histories, using a corpus of 15 oral-history interviews (25 hours of transcribed talk) collected from members of the Irish Association of Manitoba. Using a simplified discourse-historical approach, the analysis focuses on content, constructive strategies of assimilation and dissimilation, and the linguistic means by which those strategies are achieved, using Wodak et al.’s (1999) framework from an in-depth study of Austrian discourse and identity. While analysis of participants’ discourse about identity echoed much of the current theoretical knowledge available about identity — that it is a discursive construction revealed in narratives, that it is provisional and negotiated with others — the analysis also showed that for specific subgroups such as immigrants, identity construction is context-dependent, particularly for diasporic groups.

In an effort to provide our second-year organic chemistry students with experience in a scientific investigation, a staged writing approach to a chromatographic experiment was designed. Using best practices from writing in the disciplines approaches to learning, short lab exercises followed by writing assignments with periods of reflection and marker/tutor/instructor feedback were implemented. When combined with a guided peer review process by peer tutors, graded student performance in all sections of a lab report were improved. Four years of development and study found that students increase their written performance involving both the theory and principles of chromatography as well as the craft of writing when guided by a chemistry professional as well as a writing professional.

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Using Wodak’s discourse-historical approach, this article analyzes documented examples of ‘emigration-as-problem’ discourse from elite Irish discourse of the 1970s. Noting that elite discourse uses perpetuation strategies of argument to frame emigration as a negative phenomenon, the author suggests that such strategies serve important social functions in regards to creating a strawperson argument for the government and in contributing to the image of the Irish at home. The article calls for a closer look at the ways elite discourse set the terms of debate for private discourse in the range of data collected about Irish emigrant experience.