Linguist Rosina Lippi-Green concludes in her book, "English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States," "Accent discrimination can be found everywhere in our daily lives. In fact, such behavior is so commonly accepted, so widely perceived as appropriate, that it must be seen as the last back door to…

Idioms is a special culture which is shaped in the daily lives of the local people, particularly the idioms of diet has a close relation with various elements, such as the eating custom, history, fairy tales, geographic situations. Also, different ways of translation on different diet idioms in English and Chinese will be analyzed in this article.…

The major concern of the educational system in Israel today is how to advance students who come from low socioeconomic backgrounds and from a cultural background which is different from that of the privileged sectors of the population. In general, the problem of educationally disadvantaged students is related to the problem of social gaps. These…

Sociolinguistic analysis of the ways children and teachers interact verbally may provide insight into why minority children often have difficulty in school. Examples of a classroom discussion cycle are listed and discussed. (DF)

This "insider's guide" to American and Japanese communication and misunderstanding is based on the premise that Americans and Japanese have different goals in communication; the American goal is to make messages negotiated between individuals explicit, while the Japanese goal is to keep messages implicit and assumed within the group. In…

This paper presents an exploratory study, using an ethnographic approach, of linguistically and ethnically diverse parents interacting with their children. Subjects included three Persian-speaking families, three Chaldeans, and three Euro-American families; children were aged 4-5 years. Goals were to understand cross cultural communication,…

Discusses the signals that are used to create, sustain, and end conversational involvement in two different languages, with examples provided of paralinguistic attention getters, linguistic conversation initiation signals, "in-tune" signals, and "face-saving" signals from a study of English and Greek. (CB)

This paper discusses common miscommunication problems that occur between Japanese and Americans, even when both are speaking Japanese, with a focus on high contextuality and women's position in business organizations. It also examines how these cultural differences can be addressed through the use of videotaped conversations. One of the preeminent…