Reports on a study of judges' strategies in clarifying their verbal explanations of constitutional rights to criminal defendants. Identifies six clarification processes and compares them with other studies of clarification processes and with the properties of simplified registers, particularly speech addressed to first- and second-language…

Examines the nonstandard constructions in Caipira Portuguese, a dialect spoken in southeastern Brazil, which illustrate a tendency to reduce morphological redundancy at the noun phrase level. This is accomplished by restricting plural markers to only one of the elements of the noun phrase--not the noun, as might be expected, but, rather, one its…

An investigation of the process of language teaching as communication in a cross-cultural context shows that there is potential for misunderstanding. Examples of types of errors that are pragmatic rather than grammatical are discussed. A model is presented to help understand the pragmatic error. (DF)

Analyzes the attitudes and philosophies the writers of "Cosmopolitan" magazine convey to their readers so that English teachers may be aware of writing styles they ordinarily would not see. (DF)

Argues that literacy in the 1980s means the power to use language for one's own purposes as well as those of society. Explores the classroom phase of exercising this power through the critical commentary and discussion of social issues of three students in a lower-class London school. (HTH)

Describes the results of two studies indicating that people do not ordinarily process the complete literal or compositional interpretations of idiomatic expressions, and that people are automatically biased toward interpreting such language as idioms before deriving their intended literal meanings. (HTH)

Examines the relationship among writer, context, and text (1) by exploring the notion of context-independence as it pertains to writers and texts, and (2) by placing the issue of context and composition within a wider framework of context and language use. (FL)

Summarizes recent theory on communicative processes in language use, on the creation and exchange of meaning, and on the negotiation of roles in the classroom. Suggests exercises for activating and developing interactive skills between speakers and hearers in the foreign language. (EKN)

Discusses the use of stereotyped speech patterns as teaching material or as the basis of communicative exercises. Gives examples of the use of these gambits in drills and exercises in German. (EKN)

Discusses ways in which the atmosphere in an English classroom sometimes changes when a teacher-writer is in charge. (FL)

Reports that by combining a phonetic writing system with instruction in carefully selected clusters of related Chinese characters, Chinese schools can start children on productive reading at an early age with texts closer to their developed cognitive levels. (FL)

Describes how a teacher with little background in science helped her students write puppet plays as part of their learning about the science of rainbows. (FL)

Explores ERIC materials on various theories of language development and their implications for vocabulary development in classroom settings. Provides suggestions for enriching the school language environment to promote vocabulary growth. (HTH)

Examines the role of suprasegmental phonology in speech processing and its implications for reading instruction; also reviews evidence for the hypothesis that prosodic features cue the boundaries of perceptually functional units in spoken sentences, thus assisting the listener in the segmentation of verbal information. (FL)

Decries teachers' use of questions with the phrase "tell me," arguing that this locus of authority in the classroom interferes with children's understanding of the function of language. (HTH)