The job of the school business official entails accurately preparing financial statements; understanding their implications; and interpreting the salient points to the superintendent and the board of education. Offers guidelines for reporting fiscal news to a board of education. (MLF)

Shows that variation in the composition of the lexicon at token-level between more and less formal oral styles is identical to the variation between written and oral discourse. The article argues that speakers deictically anchor their utterances in a non-linguistic spatio-temporal context and that the degree of context-dependence is reflected in…

This study focuses on the importance of epistemic markers in language socialization from the perspective of the second language classroom. The goal of the study is to more fully understand what second language learners must acquire to become competent members of the target language community. (28 references) (Author/CK)

A study of the conversational patterns of two young children with blindness and two children with normal vision and their mothers found that average lengths of speaking turns of sighted children and their mothers were comparable, but blind children's turns were shorter than their mothers' turns. Mothers of blind children asked more knowledge…

Discusses the effect of the interactive accomplishment of conversational normalization. To illuminate this process, this article investigates how the parties to a news interview collaborate to normalize the interviewee's practices in operating a house of prostitution. The methodological impetus for this study involves a variant of conversation…

Examined how a new topic was introduced, maintained, and changed in the Japanese-English interlanguage data of a 45- minute interview between a native and a non-native speaker of English. Findings revealed that although the topic marking system of the interlanguage shared some features with the first and second languages, it maintained features…

Explores how children negotiated social identities through language used in spontaneous, casual conversation. Examines how audio transcripts of the childrens' conversations exhibit different aspects of their social "selves" and suggests that their talk can be analyzed in relation to the individual self, the immediately situated social actor, and…

A study investigated whether two speech measures (peak intraoral air pressure (IOP) and IOP duration) obtained during production of intervocalic stops would be altered by the presence or absence of a cochlear implant in five children (ages 7-10). The auditory condition affected peak IOP more than IOP duration. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

Responses from 29 native and 71 nonnative English-speaking business students were compared with employers' ranking of oral communication skills. Both groups rated listening and conversation highly. Native speakers ranked following instructions and listening much higher than did nonnative speakers. Work experience, age, and gender contributed to…

Provides specific ideas for using 19 psychometric instruments selected from the gender-related research literature for their value as instructional aids in the communication classroom. Concludes with a number of recommendations and cautions regarding the use of measures as educational tools. (KEH)

Discusses how television programs can be used to teach courses in gender and communication. Provides examples of how instructors can use specific programs to provide illustrative models of sex-role orientations and to illustrate the changing social standards of desirable or acceptable traits and behaviors for females and males. (KEH)

Data were collected on 731 patients (age birth to 18) at a children's hospital otolaryngology clinic. Most frequent laryngeal pathologies were subglottic stenosis, vocal nodules, laryngomalacia, and vocal fold paralysis. Laryngeal pathologies were more common to males than females, were most common in the youngest patients, and were distributed…

Encourages development of a communication assessment program designed primarily for a nontraditional, older and more diverse student population. Concludes that the prior learning assessment philosophy is a sophisticated and suitable methodology for assessing communication competency. (KEH)

Examines how boys and girls use features of stories to accomplish and restructure social identities within encounters. Finds that boys use stories to continue an ongoing argument while reshaping the domain of dispute. Finds that girls use stories to restructure alignments of participants in the current interaction and at some future time. (RS)

Analyzes the structure of a communications department at a rural comprehensive community college by focusing on the grouping of components as well as their place in the status framework. Discusses the behavior of the system as a consequence of the structure as well as its evolution. (KEH)