This paper attempts to show how a variety of phenomena in Chinese can be explained by means of a different approach to grammatical analysis. This approach consists of analyzing sentence structure from the viewpoint of communicative function; sentences are regarded as links in a chain of discourse. (CHK)

England's Durham Project studied the effect of French language instruction on young students' openness toward the French people and understanding of the French way of life. Attention was focused on the style of instruction and the role of the textbook in the development of cross-cultural attitudes. (MSE)

This discussion is a response to the Saarni commentary (Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, October 1987) on the Miller and Sperry report (Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, January 1987) on the socialization of anger and aggression. (PCB)

Describes an international dialogue project based at the University of Lund, Sweden. The project amassed over 100 video-taped interviews with academics in geography and related fields. The tapes have potential for teachers wishing to explore the oral history of geography, the role of language and social structures in shaping research, and cultural…

Language skills play an important role in learning. Teachers must understand how meanings are formed, why they are often difficult to communicate, and the importance of language in the formation and sharing of meaning. Various communication practices that inhibit or enhance the students' understanding of meaning are explored. (DF)

Freire responds to questions about the relation between philosophy of language and pedagogy, the possible importance of a "magical way" of understanding material and political reality, his literacy experiments in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, his impressions of the U.S., and the power of his methodology in practice. (RDN)

This survey of languages of the world begins with a chart of about 500 languages, organized in 21 language families. Within each family are listed subgroups and the major and minor languages within those subgroups. The chart is followed by a brief description of each language family. This in turn is followed by individual descriptions of the more…

Multicultural literature is one good way to raise children's awareness of diversity, but how does one decide what constitutes "good" multicultural children's literature? Most any book can be critiqued from numerous perspectives: first and foremost is the book's literary quality--plot, character development, setting, themes, and style; of…

This collection of articles, with a developmental learning focus, explores the core building blocks of intercultural communication. The articles in the collection represent the theory-into-practice school of intercultural communication. The collection's goal is to present basic concepts from a variety of perspectives which, when taken together,…

Title IX, the 1972 United States federal law forbidding sex discrimination in education, has a rarely-talked-about but surprisingly tenuous history which illustrates how discourses of equality come to mean political powerlessness for diverse girls and women in school. Unfortunately, "sexual" debates such as women's sports and sexual…

Because oral language is so basic, it is the first step to verbal thinking, communicating socially, and understanding literature. It is through speech that children learn how to organize their thinking and focus their ideas. Nurturing children's language is fundamental to molding them into natural and competent readers and writers. This topical…

Ethnographic pedagogy builds a bridge between nontraditional students' home community with the values of the academic community, but the point of "bridging" the two communities seems to be for the student to come over to "our side." This paper proposes an ethnographic pedagogical approach that is reciprocal, bridging both…

This paper explores the different ways in which Chinese American, Japanese American, Korean American, African American, and European American cultures value and use silence during conversation--the term "silence" is used broadly to denote limited oral speech verbal messages or the usage of fewer words to express feelings, ideas, and…

A study applied an ethnography of speaking to the study of a bilingual child, with the construct of a frame as the unit of analysis. The child was observed and tape recorded playing a commercial game in Chinese with her mother and in English with her father. Both activity frames and conceptual frames were analyzed toward answering: (1) what frames…

Language is a child's major tool for learning about the world. This book presents a naturalistic case study of one child's use of language from two-and-a-half to five years, drawing on systemic functional theory to argue that cognitive development is essentially a linguistic process and offering a new description and interpretation of linguistic…