This paper aims to demonstrate the implications of health mobility on language practices in the medical tourism industry in India and on the ways, language workers become entrepreneurs. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork that traces the trajectories of three former students of Russian, we highlight their future aspirations as language learners…

It is clear that a proper understanding of what academic English is and how to use it is crucial for success in college, and yet students face multiple obstacles in acquiring this new "code", not least that their professors often cannot agree amongst themselves on a definition and a set of rules. "Understanding Language Use in the…

Researching the longitudinal development of second language (L2) learners is essential to understanding influences on their success. This 7-year study of oral skills in adult immigrant learners of English as a second language evaluated comprehensibility, fluency, and accentedness in first-language (L1) Mandarin and Slavic language speakers. The…

This article critically reviews strategy research on learning Chinese both as a second and foreign language. Through a careful examination of major data bases in both the Chinese and English languages, the article summarizes research in the field and the principal research methods used in the studies reviewed. Moreover, key limitations in research…

Examines the verbal and nonverbal language characteristics of several renowned television preachers. Points out that they have identified and segmented their market to more fully exploit the television market and that they have mastered promotional and advertising skills. Proposes governmental controls of some aspects of religious broadcasting.…

This paper, a small part of a larger project which explores the effects of linguistic insecurity on language production, discusses the negative attitudes toward language of some of the present-day "language elite"--those who take pleasure in or earn their livelihood by "Correcting every body else." Linguistic insecurity is, then, the feeling that…

Data obtained from seventh graders does not support Chomsky's hierarchy of language rules, whereby degrees of sentence grammaticality can be assigned to ungrammatical sentences. (RB)

This book traces the development of speech from a time when the spiritual roots of words were still experienced, down to the present day when words are in danger of being little else than 'bits' of information. The book illustrates the origins of everyday words and names and traces the use of words through history. It shows how certain sounds…

Reviews the methodological issues raised by previous research into the language used by thought-disordered and nondisordered schizophrenics. (FL)

To measure the effectiveness of an intervention program of language development, it is necessary to understand childrens' knowledge and use of grammatical structures. In both standard and dialectal English, grammar rules are learned without formal instruction for forming the negative, interrogative, and other parts of speech. A mental…

Discusses the responsibility of the university to research and teach about uses of language by doctors, lawyers, government bureaucrats, and others in order to control rather than communicate. (DD)

A study investigated whether imitation plays a significant role in the acquisition of grammar. Three 6- to 8-year-old hearing-impaired children were administered the Grammatical Analysis of Elicited Language--Simple Sentence Level Test (GAEL), which is designed to evaluate hearing-impaired children's use of grammatical aspects of spoken and/or…

Compares the responses of black and white children for cultural features of standard English. (RB)

Children's ability to infer dominant or subordinate status of speakers from their requests was investigated. It was hypothesized that, for young children, syntactic indirectness, semantic softness, and a positive tone, in the absence of other cues, would serve as cues to indicate that a speaker is subordinate to a listener. Syntactic directness,…

In order to compare the foregrounding strategies of native speakers of English and advanced learners of English as a second language, 15 native speakers and 35 advanced learners produced play-by-play descriptions of the unfolding action in an animated videotape. Results show that the two groups use different strategies of foregrounding. (SED)