This article reviews major investigations that utilized discourse analysis as the method to examine classroom interactions. Discourse analysis is proposed as a valuable technique for educational evaluation. Included in the review are discussions of Bellack's teaching cycles, Sinclair and Coulthard's classroom discourse system, and Mehan's…

Two different approaches to the use of French television as an instructional medium in French language (for teaching grammar and vocabulary and for examining its presentation of the French culture) are examined, and their use for teaching two different populations is discussed. An ethnographic approach is taken. (68 references) (Author/MSE)

Presents a case study of a conversational storytelling in which a recipient redirects an ongoing storytelling. Finds that storytelling may be a way of accomplishing interpersonal activities, both for teller and recipients, and that the recipient can be an active participant in the storytelling. (MS)

Explores Michel Foucault's view of discourse and relates it to the college freshman writing experience. Describes discourse as the aim to expose a fundamental contradiction between the nature of knowledge and the notion of unchanging structures. Compares two student passages to illustrate empowerment within discourse. (KEH)

Functional analysis of longitudinal, conversational interlanguage data from two Vietnamese learners of English focused on the emergence of complex syntax in interlanguage development. The interdependence of different linguistic levels in interlanguage development was demonstrated. (Author/CB)

Stresses the importance of "teacher talk" in the foreign language classroom. Recommendations include fitting the level of language to the learner, balancing practice of both lexicon and grammar, limiting redundancy, and suiting content of the language to each sentence's specific purpose. Examples of faulty teacher talk in Spanish are…

Argues that President John F. Kennedy's civil rights discourse evidences an important evolutionary pattern marking a transition from legal argument to moral argument. Highlights two speeches as exemplars of this change. Asserts that this analysis is useful in the study of contemporary presidential discourse during times of domestic crisis. (MM)

Explores similarities and differences in native- and second- language referential communication through review of an experiment in which native Dutch speakers described unconventional abstract shapes first in Dutch and then in English. Subjects exhibited a preference, in both languages, for describing shapes in a holistic rather than segmental…

Applies a theoretical framework that encompasses cultural and social regulation of mother-child speech to observations of discourse between three mothers and their two-year-olds. Maternal speech was semantically contingent in the sense that both partners in the conversation were jointly focused on a shared topic of concern. (Author/CB)

Discusses how research in error analysis and discourse analysis can help teachers understand basic writers. Argues that the role of teachers is to recognize basic writers' attempts to construct meaningful prose by focusing on both the meaning of the text and the meaning of students' writing errors. (MM)

The political speech is a unique kind of document that reflects the socio-historic climate of its time. Two historical events (Dunkirk and the Falkland Islands Crisis) and a principal protagonist from each are discussed, and the speeches of these two individuals are analyzed in order to find similarities and differences, and to find their basic…

Reports on a study that recorded conversations about math in elementary classrooms. Notes a wide range of functions that the students employed in their talk, and that group size and leadership greatly affected the way in which language was used. Observes a process of mirroring that offers an important way by which mathematics "register"…

Investigates the processes involved in the learning of Arabic subject-verb agreement by Australians. It is hypothesized that the amount and direction of information encoding motivated by certain semantic categories as well as the availability of discourse cues would influence the learners' performance in subject-verb agreement tasks. (27…

Disfluent phenomena such as pauses, hesitations, and repairs are investigated in 42 short samples of spontaneous speech of native French speakers and learners of French. It is found that native speakers attend to the construction of the referent, whereas learners are more concerned with syntactic construction. (Contains 14 references.) (Author/LB)

This study examined nonstandard syntactic and morphological forms used by 45 poor, urban, 4- to 5.5-year-old African American children. Distributional analyses revealed three subgroups distinguished by the percentage frequencies of occurrence of utterances containing specific forms and by the predominant types used by each group. (Author)