This study investigated similarities and differences in the requesting behavior presented by American and European speakers in English and Spanish. Two specific research questions were addressed: (1) whether European or American speakers and native or non-native speakers use the same request strategies in English and Spanish; and (2) whether…

Exploring how people create meaning from their personal experience is central to clinical practice, and is equally important in examining the development of the intern therapist's clinical skills. This study examined supervision session discussions and interns' accounts of their training experiences in order to understand how meaning and knowledge…

Six teacher-researchers (three elementary school teachers, one teacher of hearing-impaired, one Chapter One teacher, and one university researcher) investigated how their membership in a community of writers affected their perceptions of themselves as writers. Three themes emerged in transcriptions of biweekly meetings held over one school year:…

To address a need for increased discussion of the dangers of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and an increased educative effort to prevent people from acquiring HIV infection, a study investigated one element of an AIDS campaign of the past: the "America Responds to AIDS" television and radio public service announcements…

An analysis of a televised interview, in Israel, of an actress playing a role in a play is presented as an illustration of politeness marking in modern Israeli Hebrew. The interviewer is well-known as an educated Ashkenazi Jew, the actress a singer well-known for her vocal portrayal of Sephardic Jews, and in this case playing an exaggeratedly…

A collaborative inquiry project illustrates moments when English teacher educators questioned literacy instructional practices that had become normative and acceptable within the schools and communities where their student teachers worked--practices that the teacher educators believed adversely affected the literacy growth of students in the…

A study analyzed the dinner-table discourse in a Caucasian-American, upper-middle-class two-parent family with children aged seven (female) and eight (male) for evidence of how family narrative practices socialize children into family, social, and cultural membership. It is also proposed that discourse in families both indexes and constitutes…

Individualized instruction significantly improves students' pedagogical and motivational outcomes. The study described here sought to characterize tutorial behaviors that could lead to these benefits and to consider why these behaviors should be pedagogically useful. The experiment studied 16 undergraduate and graduate university students learning…

This paper contends that rhetoric is a force for social change. It also contends that the study of persuasive discourse--how it works, what gives it force--is rhetoric. Pointing out that in the past "persuasive discourse" has meant public discourse of various kinds but that nowadays scholars usually expand the category to include…

Part of a larger study on pre-school children's ability to use the computer to create art, a study examined the language children used as they were exposed to and trained to use a computer software program. Subjects were 4 preschool children (4 or 5 years of age). Audio and video recordings of the children over 8 sessions yielded a total of 1,501…

This study takes a holistic perspective towards inquiry teaching by examining the alignment among teacher intentions, teaching practices, and student perceptions of teaching practices. The first part of the study examines the alignment between teacher intentions for instruction and classroom teaching practices. The second part of the study…

The use of rhetorical voice in literature and news reporting is examined and its implications for classroom study of literature are discussed. Analysis is based on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel and the definition of "voice" as an identifiable social role or position that a character enacts, and "ventriloquation" as the…

The need to underline the relationship between spoken and written language in second language instruction is discussed, and the use of student dialogue journals to accomplish this is encouraged. The first section offers an overview of the whole language approach, which emphasizes integration of language skills. The second section examines briefly…

A study examined the language and interactions that occurred in classes where teachers felt they were providing an environment that fostered reasoning about their coursework. The discourse within the diverse classrooms of eight high school teachers (two each in American literature, American history, biology, and physics) was examined. In each…

This paper provides information concerning preschool narrative development in typically developing North American children, stressing previously documented links between early narrative skills and literacy development. Methods are provided for assessing narrative skills of language-impaired children. The methods involve eliciting from the children…