Both the motivation for and attitudes of adult Argentine students studying English as a foreign language (EFL) are investigated. A questionnaire was administered to 114 adult students attending EFL classes at beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels at the Instituto Cultural Argentino Norteamericano (ICANA) in Buenos Aires. The findings…

Although "flaming" (language and behavior considered outrageous in a classroom context) is a rupture of teacher authority, it can be used in the classroom as a viable pedagogical tool. A student in a basic literature course read a long and sexually explicit narrative in rhymed couplets. The rupture in the normal classroom environment…

A study investigated the stigma associated with not speaking a native language in a Hispanic community. Subjects were 288 male and female university students and staff, both Hispanic and non-Hispanic, in the San Diego (California) area. Two forms of a paper-and-pencil survey were administered to the subjects; one gave a stimulus figure, a Mexican…

While little attention has been given in historiography to the language of historical narrative, and the role language plays in portraying history, the discipline of linguistics, and particularly the subdisciplines of discourse analysis and functional linguistics, have given increasing attention to the discourse of history. Recently, a group of…

This paper describes an educator's decision to change careers from that of foreign service officer to teacher of English as a Second Language is traced to a December 1985 event in Korea in which the American Cultural Center in Kwangju was occupied by protesting Korean students. Analysis of this event and its effect on the educator focuses on the…

Drawing from papers presented at the five "Stabilizing Indigenous Languages" symposia held since 1994, this paper recommends strategies for language revitalization at various stages of language loss. Based on a study of minority languages worldwide, Joshua Fishman postulated a continuum of eight stages of language loss, ranging from the…

Analysis of a few short segments of discourse, produced by two Afro-American college students in a freshman composition class, demonstrates one obvious way in which young people in the United States are severely threatened by the educational system. "Darrell" tells the story of how he was suspended from high school by a respected teacher…

As an extension of African-Americans' rich language and musical heritage and abilities, rap music has some value in the educational setting. Rap music started as a dance fad beginning in the mid-1970s among Blacks and Hispanics in New York's outer boroughs. It is another generational brand of Black language and musical usage and an extension of…

This paper examines the use of heritage languages in Canada and the processes surrounding the maintenance or shift of these minority languages in Canada's different linguistic minority groups. Studies of language shift or maintenance in Canada generally concern the relative positions of English and French and the changing patterns of usage along…

The principle of empathic learning (involving activities that help students feel what it is to be like someone else) can be used to teach poetry, a material about which students have strong prejudices, and an activity they cannot imagine themselves ever doing or being interested in. First, students are presented with the conception that people…

A study investigated how people make indirect refusals ("You don't need to move the bookcase" meaning "No, I won't help you move it"), and the types of information used to do so. Two experiments were conducted. The first asked 130 students (third, fifth, and eighth graders as well as college undergraduates) to write refusals to…

A study investigated whether gender differences in proscribed language behavior, attitudes, and beliefs would emerge from an anonymous self-report questionnaire. A total of 87 men and 87 women enrolled in 6 sections of a required sophomore course at a regional southeastern university voluntarily completed the questionnaire which was designed to…

This paper reports on a paper to develop two computer text corpora, called Hong Kong Texts on Hong Kong," at the University of Hong Kong English Centre. These corpora are intended to serve as a resource for teachers and researchers who need information on English usage in published text in Hong Kong. The aim of the report is to disseminate…

This paper examines the use of simplification in second language instruction. It argues that although simplification is a necessary process in coping with the conceptual and experiential chaos of the classroom, it is a potentially dangerous process that risks creating categories that become too insensitive to cope with changing audiences and…

This paper examines the nature of dictionaries and encyclopedias, focusing on some of the preparation that has gone into the construction of a dictionary of language testing at the University of Melbourne (Australia). It discusses the purpose of such dictionaries, the nature and size of dictionary/encyclopedia entries, and the readability of…