Learner agency, the capability of individual human beings to make choices and act on these choices in a way that makes a difference in their lives (Martin, 2004), is instrumental in second language learning because attainment is only arrived at by learner choice (Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000). If attainment is understood as learner engagement in…

This article discusses the use of the Finnish change-of-state token "aa" that has previously not been identified. The central claim is that even though "aa" indicates a cognitive shift experienced by the speaker, it does not function as a receipt of new information. Instead, the token "aa" indicates that the speaker…

The present study examined the influence of a human or computer "partner" on the production of fillers ("um" and "uh") during a question and answer task. Experiment 1 investigated whether or not responding to a human partner as opposed to a computer partner results in a higher rate of filler production. Participants…

As part of a growing body of conversation analytic research on epistemics in social interaction, this study explores various uses of the Japanese sentence-final particle "kke", which conveys the speaker's claim that she or he has some degree of uncertainty in recalling something from the past. The study aims to demonstrate how "mental" concepts…

Narrative discourse is an essential component of day-to-day communication, but little is known about narrative in Lewy body spectrum disorder (LBSD), including Parkinson's disease (PD), Parkinson's disease with dementia (PDD), and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). We performed a detailed analysis of a semi-structured speech sample in 32 non-aphasic…

Educators generally are concerned with testing what learners know by means of written tests, as if knowledge was some intrapsychological thing or state that could be translated and externalized into some interpsychologically available inscription that is a more-or-less accurate approximation of what the person knows. In such endeavors, language is…

Mercer, N. (1995) coined the term interthinking to link the cognitive and social functions of group talk. Essentially, interthinking means using talk to think collectively, to engage with others' ideas through oral language. In this article I share four excerpts from small group interactive read-aloud sessions that were conducted with Grade 1…

An interview with David Olson concerning his current research on the relation between the oral conversational language of preschool children and the formalized language of written texts. (RAE)

Concludes that the dramatic play context requires children to convey meaning through explicit oral language in order to introduce and sustain play episodes. (FL)

This paper, based on the analysis of forty oral and forty written personal experience narratives elicited from the same subjects for two different audiences, explores the shaping of participant reference with respect to considerations of audience and the effect of modality. The discussion first focuses on the impact of cognitive constraints on the…

Children's use of proforms in spoken descriptions of real situations was studied and compared with that of adults to explore possible developmental progressions in the use of indexical reference. A discourse distinction between situational and textual reference was applied to data from 6-year-old and 10-year-old children and from adults. Subjects…

Reports on a qualitative study of dyadic discourse between university students of Spanish as a foreign language. Explored the social and cognitive behavior of learners as they participated in second language speaking activities. Repair, as it is formulated in the ethnomethodological approach to conversation analysis provided the lens through which…

Both normal (N=19) and language-disordered (N=19) 7- to 10 year-olds used a higher rate of acceptable departures (during recall of text) from the original meaning than any other type of departure with normal children, producing a higher rate of acceptable departures. Both groups repaired fewer unacceptable grammatical departures than unacceptable…

Examines analysis of cohesion as an index of both social and cognitive factors. Oral language of reading disabled was studied and found to indicate some difficulties of the subjects when dealing with information under special social and cognitive conditions. (DF)

A study investigated the relationship between cognitive style and coherence in discourse. The primary hypothesis was that coherence would vary bimodally by cognitive style classification. Forty-four freshman composition students from three west coast colleges completed the Culture Fair Intelligence Test, the Group Embedded Figures Test, and the…