Discusses broadening public relations to an international level by incorporating the topics of culture, international practices, and culturally sensitive theory development. Discusses rationale, design, and execution of an undergraduate course in international public relations. Suggests ways to incorporate assignments addressing international…

Reports on a case study of a technique designed to increase adult English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students' communicative competence by exposing students to real audiences in authentic settings. In the approach, students learn the subtle influence of cultural and social factors of speech in a manner difficult to duplicate in a classroom. (four…

Examines proposals for task-based approaches to instruction, reviews relevant research, investigates developments in cognitive psychology, proposes a framework for the implementation of task-based instruction drawing upon relevant theory, and organizes the methods to implement such instruction so as to minimize problems and maximize goal…

Discusses the English Language Fellows (ELF) Program, a pilot project that pairs specially-trained, native-speaking undergraduates with nonnative-speaking (NNS) classmates to study the content of courses that both are taking together. Woven into that study of course content, for the benefit of the NNS students, is the study of language as it is…

Video-recorded seven demented Finnish immigrants during morning care together with bilingual and monolingual Swedish-speaking caregivers. Showed bilingual caregivers communicated more multidimensionally with patients. Found that even if monolingual interaction started in a positive manner, it became negative when parties realized they could not…

Examines the definition of fluency in the literature, and proposes a qualitative and quantitative approach that may be used to produce a "thick" description of language use for use in rating scale construction. The article suggests that validity considerations must be addressed in the construction phase of developing scales. (69 references)…

Investigates communicative intent in 31 toddlers who were slow to talk and 32 normally developing toddlers matched on SES, age, and nonverbal cognitive ability. Communicative intent was studied during free play, both with the mother and with an unfamiliar examiner. Late talkers relied more on nonword vocalization, gestures, and gesture/oral…

Teaching in a manner consistent with reform recommendations is a challenging and often overwhelming task. Part of this challenge involves using students' thinking and understanding as a basis for the development of mathematical ideas (cf. NCTM, 2000). The purpose of this article is to address this challenge by developing the notion of "pedagogical…

The authors compared parent-perceived communication behaviors for formally assessed stages longitudinally for 42 infants at risk for being nonspeaking. They compared perceived communication behaviors at assessed transitions to communicative stages (intentional behavior, intentional communication, symbolic communication) and found systematic…

We conducted a longitudinal study examining the role of phonemic awareness, phonological processing, and grammatical skills in the development of reading and spelling abilities in Greek. A battery of cognitive, linguistic, and literacy tasks was administered to 131 primary school children (65 7-year-olds and 66 9-year-olds) and was repeated in the…

This study investigates features of interaction between children that are linked to the development of understanding of mind, and asks whether these associations are evident across different relationships. Comparisons are made of the naturally occurring conversations in a sample of 43 4-year-old children, each observed with a sibling and with a…

Purpose: This study examined whether any of a series of segmental and whole-word measures of articulatory competence captured more of the variance in impressionistic ratings of severity of involvement in speech delay. It also examined whether knowing the age of the child affected severity ratings. Method: Ten very experienced speech-language…

This paper focuses on the oral referential communication skills of hearing-impaired (HI) children. A task based on that used with language impaired children by Leinonen and Letts (1997) was used to assess the speaking and listening skills of 20 HI children (mean age=10;2 years; mean better ear average hearing loss=88.85 dBHL). Their performance…

Globalisation has placed a growing importance on English language speaking and listening. Prior research indicates that many international students from Asia, studying in Australia, face serious learning difficulties and lack confidence in speaking and taking a proactive role in classrooms. The paper reports on data gathered in interviews with…

According to the theory of Universal Grammar, the primary linguistic data guides children through an innately specified space of hypotheses. On this view, similarities between child-English and adult-German are as unsurprising as similarities between cousins who have never met. By contrast, experience-based approaches to language acquisition…