A study investigated the nature and effectiveness of communication strategies (CSs) used in a negotiation task involving native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) of Spanish. Subjects were eight university students divided into NS/NNS dyads; the NSs were studying English and the NNSs were studying third- and fourth-semester Spanish. The…

A study investigated the genre, structure, and delivery of oral presentations in engineering delivered in English as a first and as a second language. Eleven manufacturing engineering presentations, four by non-native speakers of English and seven by native speakers in Loughborough, United Kingdom, were analyzed with reference to the discourse…

Two studies focused on children's reading but employed very different procedures and techniques. The first study examined the link between the levels of children's reading comprehension and the quantity of reading they did. Subjects, 198 children chosen at random from years 5, 6, and 7 of a single elementary school in Adelaide, Australia,…

An interactional sociolinguistic discourse analysis of adult, low-literate, beginning learners of English as a Second Language is presented. Four pairs of non-native speakers of English worked together on drill and practice software, interacting with each other, teachers, and software. All had zero to 6 years of previous schooling. Each pair was…

This paper discusses miscommunication in speech acts, speech act research, and applications in the classroom. A new model of speech acts proposed by Celce-Murcia, Dornyei, and Thurrell is discussed. The distinguishing feature of this model is that the pivotal center is discourse competence. Discourse competence interacts with the three subfields…

A computer-based artificial neural network (ANN) that learns to classify sentences in a text as important or unimportant is described. The program is designed to select the sentences that are important enough to be included in composition of an abstract of the text. The ANN is embedded in a conventional symbolic environment consisting of…

A study of whole language teaching in urban heterogeneous classrooms was undertaken to identify teacher student classroom discourse patterns. Using the Gutierrez Index of Coding Schema researchers identified three discourse scripts in the 14 bilingual and multicultural classrooms in Southern California under investigation. These were: the…

A study examined the role that children, mothers, and fathers played in the construction of explanations in a corpus of mealtime conversations. Data for the study were drawn from conversations collected as part of the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development. Subjects, 32 preschool children eligible for the Head Start program and…

This paper is presented as one stage of a dissertation project titled "Educational Reform as a Social Field: Structuration of Discourse in Teacher Education in Finland." It examines educational transformations and continuities through a discourse analysis of governmental committee reports on teacher education, focusing primarily on the…

A model of mono- or multimedia document structure is proposed consistent with the notion that there should be few changes in subject between one document passage and adjacent passages, where a passage may be a phrase, sentence, or paragraph. An algorithm for ordering passages in a composition is provided which is optimal given only a concern for…

In the context of an ethnographic study of nonverbal communication within the Japanese home environment, issues in the use of videotape recordings for data gathering are discussed. The study investigated language use and behavior of Japanese host families in homestay settings, focusing on the use of nonverbal behavior to facilitate communication.…

This study examined the availability and utility of negative feedback provided in the context of task-based adult conversations between native speakers and non-native speakers. Subjects were 10 dyads each consisting of a native English speaker and a college-level student of English as a Second Language. Analysis of conversational interactions…

A study demonstrates the existence of a wartime register in Japanese newspaper journalism and characterizes its major linguistic and stylistic features. Special emphasis is placed on the aspect of modality as related to point of view. Modality expresses the mode within which the propositional content of a sentence is presented as certain,…

It is argued that there is a great need to integrate critical thinking instruction in courses in English for academic purposes (EAP) and English as a Second Language (ESL). Three primary components of critical thinking are identified: understanding the author's intended meaning; synthesizing all available information, which also includes…

Research on spoken discourse that was conducted for three master's theses at the University of Oulu is summarized. The studies were as follows: (1) an examination of linguistic strategies realized in business negotiations, based on an analysis of six recordings of simulated negotiations between eight Finnish engineers and a native speaker of…