This regional dossier aims to provide a concise, description and basic statistics about minority language education in a specific region of Europe. Latgalian is a Baltic regional language originating in the region of Latgale (Latgalian: Latgola) in Eastern Latvia. It is mostly spoken in Latgale, but also in families and small communities of people…

In the face of land confiscations and other forms of imperialism characteristic of the 19th century in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the second Maori King Tawhiao devised a number of sayings that seem at first glance to be entirely mythical. Highly metaphorical and poetic, they appear to refer, as Bakhtin would have it in his discussion of the epic, to a…

Presents three studies that provide a test of gender-as-culture, or "two cultures," hypothesis proposed by Maltz and Borker (1982) to explain male/female differences in language use. Finds that gender preferences for language use among undergraduate students function in ways that are consistent with stylistic preferences that distinguish national…

Notes the positive effects of assigning students tasks that require them to find samples of language that exemplify some general theoretical principles. (RL)

A study of the feminization of personal titles in French is reported, and teaching materials based on the findings are suggested for use in college-level intermediate or advanced language classes. The objective is to help language learners understand the phenomenon of feminization and its practical implications. (Author/MSE)

Examines the less obvious differences between British and American English in regard to semantics and grammar. A comparison is made, to see how American and British styles differ for public notice, in an experiment in which speakers of American English were asked to paraphrase notices from a British public utility office. (Author/OD)

An experiment was conducted to investigate the nature of synonyms by using multidimensional scaling. The selected concept was "pig" and three of its synonyms--"hog,""boar," and "swine." These terms vary in their frequency of use in English, which makes it possible to explore a behaviorally based theory of…

Results of an error analysis of compositions by students of Spanish are reported. Advanced students are shown to still make errors in morphology, syntax, choice of prepositions, and lexical choice. Error patterns suggest utilization of variable rules in the analysis of transitional competence. (JB)

This paper reports on a paper to develop two computer text corpora, called Hong Kong Texts on Hong Kong," at the University of Hong Kong English Centre. These corpora are intended to serve as a resource for teachers and researchers who need information on English usage in published text in Hong Kong. The aim of the report is to disseminate…

The occurrence of Black English Venacular (BEV) dialect features in the writing of 42 inner-city college students was studied using such sociolinguistic methods as variable rule analysis, computer programs, and implicational scales. A comparison of the patterns found in the subjects' writing with those found in spoken BEV revealed that sometimes,…

Offers suggestions, exercises, and resources for teaching students how to study and appreciate language. (RL)

This report is intended as a preliminary survey of the problems in the collection and sociological analysis of student slang. Dealing with the notion that every speaker handles a variety of registers and tends to choose among them in accordance with the particular social situation in which he finds himself, this study isolates some of the…

A study examined repair in native-nonnative (Mandarin) speaker English conversation, focusing primarily on the previously unobserved lexical element "yeah" which occurs in a speaker's ongoing or same turn at talk. Conversational analysis was used to examine the data collected and transcribed. The data was composed of roughly 120 pages of…

A study investigated the speaking styles of black college students to determine whether selected stylistic features of speeches of students at a predominantly black university were different from those of black college students at a predominantly white university. Audiotapes were made of 25 students at the predominantly black university and 21…

Traces the development of "Australian English" from the 1940s to the present time, noting a radical change in both public and individual acceptance. Briefly surveys the extent of the scholarly documentation of Australian English in dictionaries and style manuals, and addresses the question of Australianness in a range of text types and…