In this article, we examine the relationship between classroom talk, teacher-student roles and paradigms for literacy and learning in two ninth-grade English Language Arts classes. Our goal was to understand how these roles and practices socialized students into norms for academic language and literacy as they read and wrote poetry in preparation…

Analysis of transcripts of nine undergraduate lectures in the humanities and social sciences found that professors used asides and local breaks in topicality to increase global semantic and pragmatic unity, introduce various mutually reinforcing interpretive frames, resolve apparent contradictions, highlight contrast, and establish relevance and…

A study investigated how teachers and learners negotiated meaning in three teacher-led whole-class and nine peer-group prewriting discussions in a pre-university English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) program, analyzing interaction features such as comprehension/confirmation checks, clarification/feedback requests, self/other corrections, and…

This study tested the utility of an approach to analyzing second language learners' listening skills in the context of a classroom discussion ("two-way listening skills"). The approach used was the Communicative Outcome system, which shifts the focus in discourse analysis from counting of tokens of negotiation to evaluation of what participants…

A study investigated the effectiveness of teaching preservice elementary school teachers to adopt the learner role during application of a literature discussion instructional strategy. Analysis of two discussions by 24 teacher trainees indicated that the teachers did apply the target strategy from the learner's perspective as it was taught to…

Reviews early research on innovative use of networked computers in language learning, focusing on a study of computer-mediated discussion that examined student/student and student/teacher interactions in a college French course. Due to rapid nature of computer-mediated exchanges, the "conversation" is a hybrid somewhere between writing and…

A study investigated metadiscoursal signalling devices used in discussions in a business administration course in a British university, focusing on the use and function of the devices in seminars and tutorials. Data were drawn from seminar and discussion classes recorded for distance education purposes. The corpus of about 30,000 words included 18…

The series of articles in this volume were selected from among those presented at the 8th Annual International Conference on Pragmatics and Language Learning in April 1994. Articles include: "The Right Tool for the Job: Techniques for Analysis of Natural Language Use" (Georgia M. Green); "Sinclair & Coulthard Revisited: Global-…

The workbook, with accompanying videotapes, is a complete English language course developed as a core text for an international teaching assistant training course. It is also useful as an independent study guide for foreign teaching professionals in North America who wish to improve their classroom communication skills. By watching the videos,…

Students from different cultures follow differing norms for communication, affecting the classroom and students' grades. Such patterns are found in class discussions, question-and-answer sessions, small-group interactions (issues include cooperation, structure, competition, and gender), and formal class presentations. While no single teaching…