Articulates six local, immediate, and fragmentary forms of client resistance at a Women's Social Service Organization: parodying and refusing confessional practices; fighting bureaucracies and bureaucrats; playing games; breaking rules; bitching; and revisioning relationship. Discusses attendant transformations of organizational practices,…

Argues that the contemporary language arts curriculum encompasses eight areas: literature, language, composition, speech and drama, critical thinking, technology, media literacy, and interdisciplinary studies. Offers a rationale for "cosmos" as a new metaphor for the language arts. Discusses the content of each of the eight curricular areas, and…

Outlines an introductory public relations writing course. Presents course topics and objectives, and assignments designed to meet them. Provides a sample grading rubric and evaluates major public relations writing textbooks. Discusses learning and assessment strategies. (SR)

Proposes that schooling leads to social change by fostering individual changes that alter participation; suggests that girls acquire proficiency in language used by bureaucracies such as health care. Demonstrates with data from Nepal and Venezuela how women's literacy skills influence reproductive and health outcomes for themselves and their…

Emphasizes that communicating in a foreign language requires understanding the linguistic strategies of its speakers as expressions of their frame of participation and underlying preferred politeness strategies in order to respond appropriately. The article presents results from sociolinguistic research studying a group of Spanish speakers…

Presents an approach for developing oral proficiency in the advanced conversation course that proposes, as an organizing principle, the use of Swales's concept of genre as a class of communicative events that share a communicative purpose. It is concluded that focus on genre can improve proficiency performance and articulation. (eight references)…

Examines the ability of young and older adults with mild to moderate mental retardation to produce complex sentences in naturalistic conversation. The complex sentences produced were coded into subcategories of complementation, relativization, or coordination and then analyzed. No significant differences were observed between the two age groups.…

Explores perspectives and methodologies that sociolinguistics brings to ethnographic research in schools. The article identifies the methodological contributions arising from linguistics that interactional sociolinguistics and microethnograpy share, such as the use of naturally occurring language data, the consultation of native intuition, and…

Examines the communication strategies used by adult second-language learners of English when performing contrasting pedagogic tasks. The article suggests that existing descriptions of communication strategies ignore the pragmatic function of such devices in interactive discourse and offers a reclassification that differentiates strategies…

Compares a group of adoptive couples (n=190 fathers and n=190 mothers) who increased their level of adoption openness from mediated to fully disclosed with a group who remained in mediated arrangements. Case studies illustrative of these findings and implications for professionals working with adoptive families are provided. (SR)

Used Cultural Futures Delphi procedures to interview and survey a multinational panel of 182 scholars, practitioners, and policy leaders from 9 countries to develop a curriculum geared to the development of world citizens prepared to deal with global crises and trends identified by the panel. Outlines the curriculum. (SLD)

Suggests that, for young children, learning begins in conversation. States that children's speech activities in the classroom are a vital aspect of education and should not be limited to acts of speech with pre-determined ends. Argues that young children need to express their emotions and extend their sensibility, humanity, and identity in the…

Cultural and symbolic processes--that is, communication--quite frequently play as important a role as structural issues in enabling effective governance.

The purpose of this study was to provide descriptive information about low-income fathers' and mothers' talk to toddlers and to re-examine the bridge hypothesis (Gleason, 1975) in light of current changes in family structure and childcare responsibilities. Thirty-three father-child and mother-child dyads were videotaped during semi-structured free…

In higher education, faculty are often encouraged to collaborate with their colleagues, to--as the "American Heritage Dictionary" defines it--"work together in a joint intellectual effort." The authors often think of such projects as occurring within a department or on a particular campus, but they have discovered that even…