We propose a cognitive-psychological model of linguistic intuitions about copredication statements. In copredication statements, like "The book is heavy and informative," the nominal denotes two ontologically distinct entities at the same time. This has been considered a problem for standard truth-conditional semantics. In this paper, we…

Courses: Introduction to Communication Studies, Rhetorical/Media Criticism, Political Communication, Language and Social Interaction. Objectives: The aims of this single-class activity are (1) to emphasize the complexities of communication competence; (2) to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate communication behaviors; and (3) to…

Purpose: Motivation declines as children reach adolescence. Poor motivation inhibits participation and engagement in language-based interventions. The purpose of this tutorial is to demonstrate how intervention can be designed to increase client motivation to participate while improving language-based literacy skills. Method: Motivation and…

Inclusive education currently appears to be undergoing a crisis and re-examination. This paper presents a new approach to thinking about inclusiveness in the school context. Many positions within inclusive education seem to take political, social and ethical perspectives as a starting point, which has allowed inclusive movements and initiatives…

This column explains three ways that teachers can improve reading test performance. Basically, the idea is that instead of teaching students to respond to particular question types as is typical of test preparation despite the ineffectiveness of this practice, it is better to teach students to read the test passages more effectively. Three…

Shakespeare molded language to meet his needs. Can students learn from his example? In this article, the author suggests studying Shakespeare's creative use of functional shift, spelling, and vocabulary to help students develop greater control of their own writing. The author is advocating that teachers approach Shakespeare as descriptive…

This paper sets out to show that the concept of literacy is evolving and its conventional definition, "reading and writing," is no longer adequate. Literacy is now subjected to constant redefinition to reflect criteria for social, political, religious, and economic relevance and expectations. The definition must be reframed to capture the…

Style is very important in writing. When a style matches a subject, the subject can be well expressed. The author of the article "World Leaders Pay Tribute to Reagan" succeeds in using the right style to reflect the unforgettable solemnity of the state funeral for the former president and people's deep memory of him. This paper intends…

Recent research in semantics and pragmatics has revived the debate about whether there are two cognitively distinct categories of conversational implicatures: generalised and particularised. Generalised conversational implicatures are so-called because they seem to arise more or less independently of contextual support. Particularised implicatures…

Discourse context may affect comprehension of a word in a text by facilitating lexical access or by facilitating integration of the target concept with the preceding text. In two experiments, we used eye tracking measures to examine contextual influence on the integration of role fillers in scripted narratives. In both experiments, context had an…

Despite the clear and longstanding connection between meaning vocabulary and reading comprehension, programs designed to teach vocabulary have often had surprisingly little impact on overall reading ability. One possible reason for this small effect is that teaching methods may not make this vocabulary-to-comprehension connection explicit for the…

This paper explores the issues involved in the linguistic characterisation of disordered discourse and the ways in which a Systemic Functional Linguistic framework addresses these issues. For many years, language disorders were described in terms of formal grammars, with "breakdown" discussed in terms of one or more of the traditional levels of…

The New Media Consortium's Horizon Project is an ongoing research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact in education and other industries around the world over a five-year time period. The chief products of the project are the "Horizon Reports", an annual series of publications…

Professional translators were asked what questions they asked the clients before accepting a commission, and were then asked to comment on how the answers to these questions affected the translation assignment. The creation of an "implied reader" by the translator is posited, and a variable definition of equivalence is proposed, based on pragmatic…

This article discusses three claims of the Graded Salience Hypothesis presented in Rachel Giora's book "On our mind". It is argued that these claims may give second language researchers the chance to revise the way they think about word meaning, the literal meaning-figurative meaning dichotomy and the role of context in language…