Offers a retrospective view of organizational factors affecting the redesign of the Midwest Bell Telephone Bill. Shows how financial considerations, organizational time frame, and employee training and experience influenced the bill's development process. (MM)

Advances the development of a classification system, based on the salient speech act distinctions made by ordinary people, which can be of practical use in characterizing extended segments of discourse. Presents an attempt to use speech act theory in the quantitative study of interpersonal communication. (HTH)

Discusses the problem of "overlap" sometimes experienced by interdisciplinary teams. Analyzes a brief segment of a team conversation in which overlap is discussed. Reveals participants' territoriality in the face of an ideology of interdisciplinary collaboration. (HB)

Notes that the rapid rise in private practice of an economic model known as "contract medicine" (such as the HMO) has introduced powerful new organizational constraints on interaction between member physicians and their patients. Examines the negotiation of specialty referral in two practices participating in contract plans. (MM)

Presents a new methodology for studying children's and adults' metalinguistic knowledge of the cohesive, discourse-level properties of spoken language. Studies the abilities of subjects to detect and then to explain discourse repairs in narratives. Considers why the discourse-level functions of the markers are not open to reflection. (HB)

Examines the relationship between communicative and organizational processes in the medical and financial screening steps of the patient intake process of an urban out-patient clinic. Case studies of conversational routines in medical intake show how these processes elicit and provide information in categories used to reconcile conflicting medical…

Comments on a set of five analyses of the discourse of a problem-based learning group in medicine. Discusses how the five articles take a first step toward resolving a critical issue of learning theory: understanding the boundary between common sense and technical forms of reasoning, action, and discourse; and by what means students grow from…

States that educators have argued for a kind of teaching that helps students to comprehend complex ideas. Considers that this kind of teaching might be important to low-income, cultural-minority students learning a second language, many of whom are at risk for underachievement in school. Proposes that "instructional conversations" might…

Traces the clarity of noun/pronoun referents and the use of cohesive ties in personal experience narratives told by children aged two, four, six, and nine years as well as by adults. Shows that children interrelated their sentences in similar ways as adults. Discusses implications of the study for educators. (HB)

Comments on a set of five analyses that all examine the same data (the discourse of a problem-based learning group in medicine). Argues that each of the analyses is representative not only of a research tradition, but also of a distinct research language and, as such, can be analyzed on the basis of the expressive potential of that language. (SR)