Describes a study that investigates the relationship between secondary students' written responses and the mathematical and cognitive processing used when solving a complex problem. Contains 40 references. (DDR)

Examined the distribution of two Hebrew nominal structures in spoken and written texts of two genres produced by 90 native-speaking participants. Written texts were found to be denser than spoken texts lexically and syntactically as measured by a number of novel N-N compounds and denominal adjectives per clause; in older age groups this difference…

Reports on the use of journals by prospective English for Speakers of Other Languages teachers who were asked to conduct student-teacher conferences in writing. Presents a case for making individual conferencing and subsequent reflection through journal writing an integral part of second language (L2) writing teacher education. Also discusses…

Examines the logographic stage assumption in reading models by studying how German-speaking first graders read and spell words and matched pseudowords. The findings indicate that logographic strategies are of limited importance when writing systems are phonologically transparent (as with German) and when instructional approaches do not withhold…

Analyzes the rightward movement of noun and prepositional phrases in the Early Old English poem "Beowulf." Evidence is provided for heavy noun phrase shift, with a characteristic major intonational boundary between the main verb and the postponed noun phrase, and preposition phrase extraposition, where the intonational boundary was much…

States that the study of world literacy experience illuminate literacy issues that are often sidelined or ignored in the United Kingdom. Discusses literacy and oral language, literacy and religion, and literacy and gender. (JOW)

Briefly characterizes the view of context most widely used in applied linguistics and language teaching. Research about some of the parameters that contribute to greater or lesser conceptual difficulty is outlined. Research about the role of intentionality and causality in narrative is also described. (Author/CB)

Studies the distraction potential of 45 written usage elements, traditionally considered errors, for 2 different educated reading audiences: postsecondary business communication teachers, and executive vice presidents in large firms. Finds that the usage errors least distracting to both audiences were lexical elements and the use of an adverbial…

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…