Presents an analysis of the speech practices of preschool children engaged in daily play and interactions, by adopting a perspective that recognizes young children organizing social membership through talk and activity. A reading based on traditional early childhood practices is contrasted with an alternative reading showing children constructing…

Argues that an examination of expert-novice relationships in unfolding interaction should not proceed from the static and unidirectional view that knowledge and status are distributed as functions of "a priori" categories such as age, gender, and hierarchical rank. Demonstrates that the constitution of expert-novice in dynamic interaction is a…

Analyzes listener back-channel responses observed in conversations--in English--between American and Japanese university students. Emphasizes the importance of careful attention given to the interactional management observed in intercultural conversation as well as the significance of realizing "otherness" in communication and social…

Focuses on the narrative activity between parents and children to coconstruct both the meaning of a spousal narrative dispute as speech event and what it meant that such an episode had been videotaped. The family members codrafted a revised account of their story realm that seems to minimize chaos and maximize order and emphasize that "father…

Offers a commentary on the studies of Kyratzis and Guo, Goodwin, Nakamura and Cook-Gumperz and Szymanski comprising the special issue of this journal. The special issue is situated in the history of gender studies in developmental pragmatics. The inadequately recognized role of cultural factors is highlighted. (Author/VWL)

Purpose: This article explores distributed leadership as it relates to two teacher teams in one public secondary school. Both situational and social aspects of distributed leadership are foci of investigation. Methods: The qualitative study used constant comparative analysis and discourse analysis to explore leadership as a distributed phenomenon.…

This essay demonstrates the origins, rationale and utility for social cartography as a process capable of portraying the interrelations of truth and value choices in the field of educational policy studies. The article focuses on the particular domain of environmental education-related discourse while presenting both a primary conceptual mapping…

Discourse analysis describes a level of spoken text that lies between grammar and nonlinguistic organization. Using such an approach to understand the practical problems of communication in supervisory conferences, this paper explores two dimensions of the conference: risk and politeness levels. Level of risk is determined by the degrees of…

An ethnographic approach is taken to describe the development of student critical thinking in the Pittsburgh Discussion Project, focusing primarily on discussion experiences in three classes (one college-bound 9th-grade class and two mainstream 11th-grade classes) over the school year. Weekly discussions were audiotaped, and interviews were…

A study examined the relationship between interaction involvement--a kind of communication competence--and communication behavior in a negotiation setting. Subjects, 120 college students, completed the Interaction Involvement Scale and were placed in same-sex dyads of three types: (1) mixed dyads of one high- and one low-involved subject; (2)…

The study described in this paper illustrates how key features of rhetorical analysis can be operationalized to apply to the study of therapeutic transactions. After a discussion of psychotherapy as an influence process, the paper describes the methodology used in an analysis of tape-recorded discourse between three therapist/client dyads in an…

Dynamics of discussion in the classroom are analyzed based on data from 64 classrooms in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. Among the discourse problems considered are the separation of answers from questions, the relationship between the presupposition of an utterance and the speaker/hearer assumptions, and the relationship between utterance form and…

An analysis of questioning strategies considers the kinds of responses that can be made to a question (different kinds of questions and their customary responses, and different kinds of response to the same kind of question). Additionally, the advantages/disadvantages to the use of the reproduction criterion in a sociological study are assessed.…

Investigation of discourse structures in bilingual (German-English) families indicated that parents' discursive strategies were related to the children's acquisition of the minority language and that children were more likely to speak the minority language if the respective parent employed a more child-centered mode of interaction than the parent…