Discusses the impact of printing on early modern Europe, especially on the Italian Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, and the rise of modern science. (JMF)

Examines the relation of Pidgin Sign English to American Sign Language and the written English of deaf persons. (AM)

Opposes the proposed simplification of phonetic transcription for English ("Zielsprache Englisch," 1978/4), on substantive and methodological grounds, finding that it cannot be made to reflect the facts of the language, and that it would cause learning problems. (IFS/WGA)

Two areas of concern are addressed: comprehension and expression. It is suggested that an increasing number of students in Great Britain show lower levels of academic achievement in these two areas. (LBH)

Analyzes written discourse that explores the actual structuring of text via some consistent framework. Highlights efforts to find the structures and linguistic patterns in texts that contribute to how they are understood, interpreted, and used. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on the problem of cultural stereotyping in work on intercultural communication. Describes recent interest in culture in relation to language learning and the problematic nature of the concept of culture. Concludes that Chinese attitudes toward academic study are diverse, and argues that culture is a contested area of discourse. (15…

Discusses grammatology, the theory and practice of writing. Highlights include the history of writing systems; writing and speech; integrational grammatology, which indicates that writing is a form of communication that integrates activities; spatial relations; and computer technology that blurs boundaries between reading and writing and between…

Looks at systematicity from the perspective of two putative discourse universals related to topic continuity that have been addressed separately in past studies of article acquisition. Examines how these discourse universals account for patterns of article use and nonuse in narratives written by Finnish- and Swedish-speaking learners of English.…

Analyzes the use of verb-noun collocations by advanced German speaking students of English in free written production. Types of mistakes that learners make when producing collocations are identified. The influence of the degree of restriction of a combination and of learners' first language on the production of collocations is investigated. (VWL)

This article argues for widening the research base on reading from the specific constraints of reading in alphabetic scripts to a larger database covering a variety of scripts. Several recent studies on reading the alphasyllabaries of India are reviewed. Findings indicate that alphasyllabaries are not processed in the same manner as alphabets.…

Examines individual differences in the ability to integrate information from word parts and context in interpreting novel kanji compounds. Also investigated the relationship between students' beliefs about the effectiveness of using kanji and/or contextual clues and their abilities to use the clues. (Author/VWL)

Describes the unicode project, which is working toward a single computer encoding scheme for all the worlds' scripts. It focuses on the special challenge of encoding Chinese characters, and uses the example of Hokkien, a Chinese dialect spoken by most people in Taiwan, to explore the problem of unorthodox, unstable, or unofficial scripts.…

Uses a conversation analytic framework to analyze a practice used by teachers in 1-0-1, second language writing conferences when eliciting self-correction of students' written language errors. This type of turn used to elicit a knowledge display from the student is labeled designedly incomplete utterance (DIU). Teachers use DIUs made up of…

Reports on the use of Systeme-D, a writing tool for learners of French that combines a bilingual word processor with an interconnected set of language reference materials, as a research tool to investigate the types of queries language learners use during the composing process. (24 references) (CB)

Discusses four general areas of linguistics studies that are particularly relevant to literacy issues: (1) discourse analysis, including text analysis, spoken and written language, and home and school discourse; (2) relationships between speech and writing, the distance between dialects and written norms, and developmental writing; (3)…