Examines the writing of five administrators and six caseworkers in a county social services agency to determine their sensitivity to rhetorical issues and writing style. (HOD)

To describe interviewees' discourse and to contrast successful and unsuccessful communicative behaviors, investigated their communication. Behaviors from rhetorical theory were also searched for criteria of effectiveness. Successful candidates displayed more behaviors that identified them with employers, supported arguments, organized thoughts,…

A survey of writing research indicates positive directions for teaching composition: reflecting developmental patterns in curriculum guides; emphasizing prewriting and revising strategies; giving priority to problem solving and creative thinking skills, attending to rhetorical issues like purpose and audience, and conducting research in the…

Undertakes to classify the various types of questions occurring in everyday speech for the use in foreign language teaching. (IFS/WGA)

Presents a case study of an elementary school child with a learning disability to illustrate that both performance and disability have to be understood in terms of the social environments with which they are linked. (FL)

Examines an aspect of colloquial American English in which linguistics and area studies are involved. Analyzes typical errors which lead to misunderstandings and discusses in detail the use of the expressions "excuse me" and "I'm sorry." (IFS/WGA)

Traces the development of an approach to studying face-to-face interaction that proposes to expound the rules or procedures of interaction and to account for observed behavior in terms of how it functions as a communicational system. A selective literature review and recommendations for further study are included. (EJS)

This article discusses various studies that deal with understanding written and oral discourse and demonstrates the implications of these studies for second language teaching. (CFM)

Provides details of a study on mathematics learning that applies Bruner's concept of format of interaction which is employed in language acquisition theory and in understanding mathematical augmentation. Describes the interactions among tutors, students, and their linear algebra text. (DDR)

Responds to Allison's (1996) defense of pragmatism, arguing that it is necessary to distinguish between "vulgar" and "critical" pragmatism and showing how various "discourses of neutrality" help construct English for academic purposes (EAP) as a neutral enterprise. Some of the directions in which a critical approach to EAP might proceed are…

Attributed stages of generic structure to eight language testing interviews of adult students of English as a Second Language on the basis of apparent interviewer purpose, an attribution justified by the distribution of speech function types and mood choices between them. The study adopted the intermediate level of transaction in analyzing the…

Focuses on the evolution of research traditions dedicated to the empirical study of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) use for teaching English as a Second Language. (99 references) (CK)

Demonstrates how the teacher can use texts to confront learners with cultural representations. Four texts are used to represent a literary extract, a student essay, an advertising document, and a newspaper article. The article illustrates approaches that borrow from stylistics, linguistics, and discourse analysis. (21 references) (Author/CK)

Analyzes the narrative, descriptive, and evaluative structures of one person's two stories, drawn from oral proficiency interviews, about the same event told at the intermediate high and advanced levels on the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) scale. The discourse analysis revealed that the second story builds upon the…

Focuses on personal pronouns in business discourse, using data from four business meetings: formal and informal, in Dutch and in Italian. The article focuses on the pronouns "I" and "we," commenting on the frequency of Dutch inclusive "we," absent from the Italian data. The article also discusses indexical and…