Endorses the position that fabricated discourse presented as nonfictional in nature is a model of ordinary talk, which is relied upon to convince an audience of its verisimilitude. The purpose of the article is to document the strategies used in a puppet show, "The Sooty Show," and to demonstrate their effectiveness in generating a sense…

Reviews Deborah Tannen's collection of essays, "Gender and Discourse." The review maintains that this collection is padded with anecdotes but provides little evidence of the research supposedly underlying this work. It is concluded that what is needed in a discussion of gender and discourse is a methodology in which linguistic features…

Discusses the dominant paradigm for analyzing interactions, Conversation Analysis (CA), pointing out that the paradigm does not include participant intention in its analysis. Notes that CA practitioners focus on empirical investigations of what the participants are doing and how they are doing it and that the understanding of an utterance is…

Presents an approach to task-based second-language instruction that relies on class discussion as the departure point. After proposing that communication be viewed as the expression, interpretation, and negotiation of meaning, classroom practices are developed that reflect all three dimensions. Four discussion questions are transformed into…

Discusses potential problems and advantages of assessing grammatical competence from production data from interactional contexts. Argues that regardless of difficulties in assessing grammatical competence in interactional contexts, the types of interactions change with time, as the interlanguage grammar develops. (9 references) (Author/CK)

Probes the nature and extent of public conversations as indicators of community cohesiveness. (MH)

This paper studies meaning as a construct of human interaction. Basic to this approach is the concept of the act of communication, which may be realized verbally or non-verbally. In order to integrate non-verbal behaviors into descriptions of discourse and interaction, a series of functional, not anatomic, categories is needed. For the kinesic…

This is an examination of beginning teachers' acquisition of the structures of classroom discourse. Teachers were compared at the beginning and at the end of their first teaching year using a discourse analysis system. Thirty-three hours of audiotapes from 11 teachers were transcribed an coded. Teacher initiations during informing, eliciting, and…

The use of discourse analysis in examining the classroom language interactions between English teachers and their students builds on the basic concepts of language function and language sequence. The four language functions are eliciting, informing, directing, and boundary marking (marking the divisions of discourse units). The three language…

This report considers some of the expectations, conventions, and strategies relied upon by Anglo children when they are participating in the speech event of storytelling, with particular focus on the children's interweaving of narrational and metanarrational speech. The data were obtained from white middle-class schoolchildren, aged six through…

The actual process of reading diagnosis and the effects of examiner/student interaction upon the diagnostic outcome were explored in this study. A testing session of approximately 50 minutes, conducted by a university professor to determine the reading problems of a nine-year-old boy, was videotaped. Applying an ethnomethodological model for…

Extends the work with distributional structures to the analysis of leaders' oral behaviors. (MH)

Examines how people use "accounts," (communicate their own preferred meaning to explain a failure or problem in a more acceptable way). Illustrates the use of accounts in a teacher-student conference. (PD)

Presents a computer analysis of talk-silence patterns of mixed sex triads related to levels of communication apprehension. Results indicate that high apprehensives talk less, talk less often, and are interrupted less often than low apprehensives. Discusses the implications of computer use in talk-silence behavior research. (JMF)

Argues that the study of discourse and the larger context of social interaction requires explicit reference to a broader organizational setting and aspects of cultural beliefs often ignored by students of discourse, conversational analysis, and paralinguistic and nonverbal activities. (FL)