Under dominant, autonomous views of literacy, students' humorous language use during literacy events is often dismissed as 'off task' behaviour. Taking a languaging perspective, this paper considers how third-grade, emergent bilingual students' humorous language use functioned in both 'official' and 'peer' worlds during eBook composing events…

Warning: This article contains humor, which may not be appropriate for some of you, particularly if you have the sense of humor of a grapefruit. Reader discretion is advised. You will miss this trailblazing, earth-shattering, possibly Pulitzer-prize-winning contribution to the literature. However, that's okay. To accommodate your…

There has been little research into how children use language play in writing. The unprompted language play of 36 children was investigated through their writing of a short advertisement. The sample comprised three attainment sub-groups from a larger repeat-design study of persuasive writing in the 9-11 age-range. The writing was analysed using…

Purpose: Unlike formalist and functional approaches to literacy and teaching writing, a languaging theory approach centers on the dynamic and interpersonal nature of writing. The purpose of this study was to determine students' ability to engage in explicit reflection about their languaging actions in response to their personal narrative writing…

There has been little research into 'language play', the manipulation of language for enjoyment, in children's narrative writing. The unprompted language play of 36 children was investigated in their writing of an imaginative story. The sample comprised three attainment sub-groups from a larger repeat-design quantitative study of writing…

A corpus of 313 freshman college essays was analyzed in order to better understand the forms and functions of humor in academic writing. Human ratings of humor and wordplay were statistically aggregated using Factor Analysis to provide an overall "Humor" component score for each essay in the corpus. In addition, the essays were also…

Ambiguity can be enjoyed in statements without context, in unclear comparisons, in words often confused, and in casual disorders. In spite of the grammarians' efforts to "disambiguate," it is doubtful that any willful act or combination of acts can eliminate ambiguity, since language is a system of symbols which can stand for one thing or another.…

Appraises the results of an exercise in which students in a composition class attempted to write detective stories. Concludes that many of their syntactic errors result from their intentions exceeding their level of writing skill. (RBW)

Writing teachers should consider cultural pluralism as a rich resource in their classrooms, rather than as a distraction with which to cope. Because speakers of nonstandard English have important language skills in at least two different dialects, teachers should not only teach the standard dialect but also invite nonstandard English speaking…

Two methods of analysis, logical and psychological (or, loosely, aesthetic and functional) are used to investigate the many kinds of languages man uses to communicate, the ways in which these languages operate, and the reasons for communication failures. Based on a discussion of the nature of symbols, since most languages of communication draw…

Concentrating on the unintentionally dominant group, the author considers how Walter Ong demonstrates that novice writers have a narrow concept of audience that is really a narcissistic fiction projected as an ideal reader (1975). Given this, writing instructors can work to broaden their students' sense of audience to consider readers who are not…