The project "Threshold Level," initiated by the Council of Europe in 1976, is compared with "Francais fondamental," comparing their aims and their differences. Offered as an interim statement, the article leaves open the question of whether Francais fondamental should be replaced by the the Threshold Level. (IFS/WGA)

Reviews materials currently available for teaching phonic structure in French, and offers suggestions concerning teaching methods. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Because of a lack of preparation, student visits to France are likely to be unproductive in acquiring competence in spoken French. Non-linguistic factors are important here: the student should build up a circle of acquaintances to learn more quickly the differences between spoken and written French. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Since language is the predominant instrument by which information is transmitted between doctor and patient, an understanding of the uses and functions of language in medicine is crucial to effective medical care. This paper describes a framework for the study of language as a tool in medicine. (LBH)

The best assessment instrument is the one which tests the students on linguistic patterns and speech events familiar to the student; these instruments must be oriented to the speech communities to be tested. Validation of these materials must also take place within the target population. At the same time these testing materials must test both…

Offers a rhetorical/ideological reading of the 1993 article "How to Get Published" by James W. Chesebro. Argues that the essay is a disciplinary manifesto advancing particular values of professional community as well as of research, revealing militantly conventionalizing aspects of the disciplinary community. Argues that these work against, not…

Focuses on some positions advanced by Firth and Wagner in a preceding article regarding research in second language acquisition (SLA). Argues that if the microanalytic tools of conversation analysis were incorporated into a language socialization approach to SLA, it would be possible to reconstruct links between second language discourse and the…

The job of the school business official entails accurately preparing financial statements; understanding their implications; and interpreting the salient points to the superintendent and the board of education. Offers guidelines for reporting fiscal news to a board of education. (MLF)

Shows that variation in the composition of the lexicon at token-level between more and less formal oral styles is identical to the variation between written and oral discourse. The article argues that speakers deictically anchor their utterances in a non-linguistic spatio-temporal context and that the degree of context-dependence is reflected in…

This study focuses on the importance of epistemic markers in language socialization from the perspective of the second language classroom. The goal of the study is to more fully understand what second language learners must acquire to become competent members of the target language community. (28 references) (Author/CK)

A study of the conversational patterns of two young children with blindness and two children with normal vision and their mothers found that average lengths of speaking turns of sighted children and their mothers were comparable, but blind children's turns were shorter than their mothers' turns. Mothers of blind children asked more knowledge…

Discusses the effect of the interactive accomplishment of conversational normalization. To illuminate this process, this article investigates how the parties to a news interview collaborate to normalize the interviewee's practices in operating a house of prostitution. The methodological impetus for this study involves a variant of conversation…

Examined how a new topic was introduced, maintained, and changed in the Japanese-English interlanguage data of a 45- minute interview between a native and a non-native speaker of English. Findings revealed that although the topic marking system of the interlanguage shared some features with the first and second languages, it maintained features…

Explores how children negotiated social identities through language used in spontaneous, casual conversation. Examines how audio transcripts of the childrens' conversations exhibit different aspects of their social "selves" and suggests that their talk can be analyzed in relation to the individual self, the immediately situated social actor, and…