Talk between students and their teachers is central to learning at school, yet students' competence is often understood as the outcome of instructional talk rather than essential to successful participation in instructional talk. Curriculum frameworks used to attribute students with levels of competence reflect these understandings. This article…

Criticizes the proposed revisions in Manitoba's senior high school English curriculum for their emphasis on language development as a series of skills to be acquired rather than as an exciting means of exploring the world. (MM)

Both written and spoken language use need to be understood within a broader theory of language. Some of the core assumptions that would inform such a theory are as follows. First, language is inherently social. Every structural component of language has a history of social discourse that defines it. Second, language is for communication; meaning…

This report summarizes six studies that examined the work of the Swedish Free Writing in School (FRIS) project, which followed the language development of 191 elementary school students from different socioeconomic areas over a three-year period. Following a brief description of the project, the report discusses each of the six studies, which deal…

Articles presented include: "Introducing the New Literacy" (John Willinsky); "The Emergence of Literacy" (Nigel Hall); "Media Education: The Limits of a Discourse" (David Buckingham); "Extracts from 'Thought and Language' and 'Mind in Society'" (L. S. Vygotsky); "From Communicating to Talking" (Jerome Bruner); "What Does It Mean To Be Bilingual?"…

Papers by teachers and teacher trainers address issues in bilingualism and related teaching techniques in the elementary school classroom in England. They are derived from an inservice teacher training project. Essays include: "Investigating Children's Discourse in the Primary Classroom: The Linguistic Demands of Classroom Tasks"…

Exploring questions about how the classroom environment affects young learners, this book describes how young children from various cultural and linguistic backgrounds have coped with the conditions surrounding them in process oriented writing classrooms. Chapter 1 describes the kinds of activities in which children engage in seemingly chaotic…

Papers (entirely in French) presented at the conference on linguistics include these topics: language used in the legislature of New Brunswick; cohesion in the text of Arabic-speaking language learners; automatic adverb recognition; logic of machine translation in teaching revision; expansion in physics texts; discourse analysis and the syntax of…