This corpus-based study explores the expression of gratitude in the acknowledgement section of doctoral dissertations in both English and Arabic. The objective is to analyse how gratitude in academic discourse is structured in these languages and to explore any differences related to gender. The study examines 80 dissertations (40 in English and…

New content standards integrate content and language in ways prior standards have never done. That's why it's so critically important that teachers attend to both content and language development when introducing new subject matter, especially for English learners. Here's your opportunity to get started tomorrow and every day thereafter: Alison…

This study investigated the effects of auditory and audiovisual text presentation on the three levels of mental representations assumed in theories of discourse processing. A sample of 106 children aged 7, 9, and 11 years listened to 16 short narrative texts, 8 of which were accompanied by a series of pictures illustrating the content.…

This study investigated interrogative structures most frequently used by native speakers of French, in an attempt to reconcile differences between language forms taught in the French as a foreign language classroom and those that are encountered in authentic input. Radio, television, and magazine interviews provided multiple examples of…

Speakers in conversation typically repeat and modify earlier comments. In mathematics conversations, these repetitions, or poetic structures, can facilitate the collaborative discovery of mathematical relationships. A close analysis of 90 turns of an algebraic problem-solving conversation reveals eight types of poetic structures. This report…

One of the major challenges in teaching English to speakers of other languages is the issue of inadequate contact time between teachers and learners and between learners and comprehensible English language input. This paper emanated from a burning desire to help learners in South African educational institutions, especially those in remote areas,…

Most conversation analysis (CA) studies of the initiation-response-feedback (IRF; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975) sequence have focused on teacher actions in the feedback move. In this article, I use CA to analyze student initiatives (Waring, 2011) within an IRF sequence in one excerpt from a Chinese as a foreign language class. The excerpt…

The following is a qualitative case study presenting three vignettes exploring the use of language play while microblogging during an academically sanctioned task. Ten students and one teacher used "Twitter" in an intensive, English as a second language advanced grammar course to practice writing sentences with complex grammatical…

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 2014 International Conference of Pragmatics and Language Learning at Indiana University. It includes fourteen papers on a variety of topics, with a diversity of first and second languages, and a wide range of methods used to collect pragmatic data in L2 and FL settings. This volume is…

Writing in English is often a problem for EFL learners in part because students may translate literally from their L1, and also because they may organise their writing by focusing on the grammatical structure at the level of clause or sentence. However, many studies argue that language is meaningful at a unit larger than a clause or sentence…

Seventy-seven new academics--59 at a large, public university in the UK and 18 at a medium-sized, private comprehensive university in the USA--were asked to read an extract of an article on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and mark the text according to categories of difficulty or dislike. Analysis of the data revealed six main…

This booklet is one of a series of teacher-written curriculum publications launched by the Bay Area Writing Project, each focusing on a different aspect of the teaching of composition. The basic principles of literary cohesion (the way a text hangs together) are discussed and exercises are suggested to help students increase their sensitivity to…

The development of alternative instructional activities for use in the basic writing classroom and a description and analysis of four levels of basic writing are the results of a study of basic writing teaching techniques. The linguistic concepts of immediate and transferred utterances and nominal-verbal pairing, and the work of L. Vygotsky on…

"Strunctional" analysis identifies, simultaneously yet separately, both the structural and functional links that tie sentence pairs together. Coherence in prose results from an appropriate combination of structural and functional relations between each sentence pair. Structural links between sentences comprise syntactic and lexical links;…

An assignment to write a comment in less than fifty words encourages conciseness and precision. (JH)