Thinking together in primary classrooms has received much scholarly attention in recent years, with a focus on educational dialogue at the forefront of studies concerned with identifying what constitutes effective language for learning. Whilst the expression of explicit reasoning is often discussed, less attention has been given to the role that…

Contends that the organization of comments made by one discourse participant on the contributions of another reveals a hierarchy of relevance and informativity. Illustrates this with discourse samples subjected to a particular method of analysis. (FL)

Indicates a periodic structure in the distribution of between-turn silences in two-party conversation, a finding that is inconsistent with current stochastic or signaling models, which view social interaction as an exchange of stimuli and responses. Finds that social interaction is fundamentally a collaborative activity. (JD)

The flow of normal conversation is often impeded by error. These errors can be divided into at least three categories: phonological, lexical, and pragmatic. A study was designed to assess whether different kinds of errors affect conversation in different ways. Forty-four subjects listened to tapes of conversations. Each conversation contained…

Discusses the sources of information in oral language. Uses converging evidence from prosody, pausing, structural and semantic parallelism, and stylistic analysis to argue for a series of hypotheses about the units that organize the construction of narrative discourse. Provides examples and appendixes. (JD)

This paper reports on an investigation into the discourse features of seven dialogues published in coursebooks between 1981 and 1997, and contrasts them with comparable authentic interactions. It finds that the textbook dialogues differ considerably from their authentic equivalents across a range of discourse features: length and turn-taking…

Spoken communication between residents (n=10; ages 12-21) and staff members in an institution for people with mental retardation was examined. Findings suggest that staff members and residents differed in their use of topics, with staff members talking primarily about instructional and behavior management topics and residents focusing mostly on…

A study analyzed four dyadic conversations for evidence of the signals operating in the turn-taking process and facilitating the smooth exchange of turns. It found over 20 syntactic, prosodic, and semantic features occurring frequently with turn-taking. The five most significant factors correlating with turn-taking were a prosodically completed…

Examines status in institutional discourse and identifies congruence as a factor in the success of native and nonnative speakers. Nonnative speakers suffered from a lack of context-specific pragmatic competence involving the use of status preserving strategies and appropriate content for noncongruent speech acts. (21 references) (JL)

Analyzes the characteristics of exolingual communication, illustrated by case studies of dialogues between French and Latin American Spanish speakers. Hypotheses about exolingual communication are presented, specifically on the "guidance" offered by native speakers and the role of metalinguistic activities. (Author/CB).

Differences in spoken and written English appear at every level of the language; there are differences in phonology, morphology, vocabulary, and syntax, as well as differences in acceptability levels. This study contains four sections and an inventory of contrasting forms. Section One deals with domains and modalities including those discourse…

Early speech-act theorists studied isolated speech acts, often in terms of single sentences invented by the investigator, an approach that had obvious limitations. It is now known that speech acts ought to be investigated by looking at utterances in their full interactional context. A hierarchical model of the structure of conversation that is…

A study of the dialogue journal writing of six sixth grade students of English as a Second Language (ESL) examines the interaction with the teacher. The subjects had been in the United States for less than a year, and came from Korean, Vietnamese/Chinese, Burmese, and Italian language backgrounds. Data for the study were drawn from the students'…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the use of connectives by learners of English as a foreign language and their length of study. Eighteen writing samples were collected, six from learners with 2 years of study of English and 12 from learners with 3 years of study. Results found that students' length of study was…

The selection of papers from the 6th Annual International Conference on Pragmatics and Language Learning (Urbana, Illinois, April 1992) include: "Discourse Markers Across Language" (Bruce Fraser); "Conjunction and Causality: Pragmatics and the Lexicon" (Yael Ziv); "Situated Discourse: The Sociocultural Context of…