Examines American Sign Language (ASL) in the context of the orality/literacy debate and issues of language and cognition. Posits that ASL is a natural language independent of English, and asserts that examining other modes of language use can illuminate the nature of discourse in both oral and written forms. (MM)

Describes the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), a project at the University of Louvain in Belgium that collects written work from, and analyzes the usage of, advanced adult English as a Foreign Language learners. Recurring combinations and concordances in ICLE are examined. (Contains five references.) (MDM)

Reviews the evolution of semicolon use in English, examining the frequency of semicolons, colons, and dashes in grammar, language, and linguistic books from the mid-16th century to the present. Concludes that after flourishing in the 17th and 18th centuries, the semicolon may have become a marginal component of the English punctuation system. (42…

Examines a computer-based corpus that provides the data for a comprehensive investigation of clitic climbing in written and spoken modern Spanish. The results are based on nearly 15,000 tokens with 32 different main verbs from a computer corpus of 3.5 million words from ten countries. Clitic climbing is more common in spoken than in written…

This study proposes a new measure of lexical richness, the Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP), which looks at the proportion of high-frequency general service and academic words in learners' writing. The results of a study involving 65 second-language students indicated that LFP scores were comparable to scores on other vocabulary measures. (14…

Investigates the factors that constrain and promote the selection of noun compound types in spoken and written Hebrew. Three types of data were examined, one spoken and two written. Lexical, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic analyses revealed that construct-state compounds are the default form for expressing relations. (55 references) (Author)

This article describes "language" use in a religious domain where the very notion of 'language' must be defined in a qualitatively special way. It is suggested that within the traditional Islamic educational system, Arabic among the Kanuri of northeast Nigeria is first acquired as a "graphic," an invisible whole that, by its…

Examines the pragmatic uses of narrative structures in the written stories of native-English speaking and native-Spanish speaking college students. It is shown that there are subtle differences in the way that the two groups use structures, suggesting that native-English and native-Spanish narrators have differing perceptions of themselves and…

Research articles from the oldest continuing medical journal in English were studied in terms of rhetorical analysis of broad genre characteristics and linguistic analysis of registral features using Biber's system of text analysis. Results suggest evolution influenced can be accounted for by changing epistemological norms of medical knowledge,…

After a discussion of the limitations of early contrastive rhetoric theory and the need for a richer view that considers different cultures, this article reports on a survey of Japanese and Arabic English-as-a-Second-Language students to examine how writing is taught in different cultures. Differing emphases on expressive and transactional…

This paper offers an endorsement of mainstream placements for adolescents with severe and profound hearing impairments, describes successful mainstreaming at Clarke School for the Deaf (Massachusetts) in classrooms using spoken and written English, points out roadblocks that must be negotiated for successful mainstream education, and outlines…

Briefly describes a program that sought to improve the written English skills of deaf adolescents' whose first language was American Sign Language, focusing on first-language skills, metalinguistic skills, translating skills, lexical matching across languages, translation of syntactical structures, and recognition of the importance of the…

Presents as an alternative to the traditional Spanish textbook a modular approach that consists of activities based on essay reading and grammar exercises. Students liked this form of instruction, and most indicated that they had learned material previously unknown to them. (seven references) (Author/CK)

Takes the communicative intentions of the writer to a typical type of business letter as the basis for a genre-analysis and suggests that such a perspective will allow English-for-special-purpose practitioners to teach business writing more effectively and economically. Examples from a Singapore government project are used to illustrate this…

Reports on two studies that sought to identify the rhetorical preferences of native speakers when reading inter-English and to compare these with their rhetorical preferences when reading authentic English. (66 references) (JL)