A study examined: (1) first-year college students and their perceptions of writing; (2) teaching assistants and their discursive preferences; and (3) possible limitations in the program's approach toward portfolio assessment. The study began with the examination of narration, persuasion, and analysis papers from six freshman portfolios. These…

This study examined Japanese/English code-switching in three different contexts: a bilingual radio program broadcast in Japan; language of two bilingual siblings; and an adult bilingual dinner party. Particular attention was paid to the situational meanings of code-switching and to politeness issues. Code-switching was examined first at four…

Currently, no machine translation (MT) system is capable of successfully imitating the behavior of a human translator, and there exists no formal description of what an MT system is supposed to do. The biggest problem in practice is disambiguation. However, various types of existing systems do help reduce language barriers, even if they are poor…

An experiment compared the tagging of two languages: Czech, a highly inflected language with a high degree of ambiguity, and English. For Czech, the corpus was one gathered in the 1970s at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences; for English, it was the Wall Street Journal corpus. Results indicate 81.53 percent accuracy for Czech and 96.83 percent…

The four 1997 issues include these articles: "Introduction to Government and Binding Theory," parts 4-7 (Cheryl A. Black), which discuss constraints on movement, semantic roles and case theory, binding theory, and more recent additions to the theory; "A Scholar's Ethic" (William J. Samarin), concerning the behavior of scholars…

This study investigated similarities and differences in Egyptian Arabic and American English refusals, using a modified discourse completion test (DCT) consisting of three requests, three invitations, three offers, and three suggestions. Each situation included one refusal to a person of higher status, one to a person of equal status, and one to a…

This dissertation presents the construction and development of a thesis that investigates links between discourses of gender and the production of writing by girls at primary school. The research took place over three years in a one-teacher rural school in country Victoria (Australia). The girls were aged from four to twelve. The research…

This book provides theoretically informed guidance to practicing the key research methods for investigating society and culture. It is a text in both methods and methodology, in which the importance of understanding the historical, theoretical and institutional context in which particular methods have developed is stressed. The contributors of the…

Outlines how the current work in linguistics and psychology can be joined with rhetoric in the study of cohesion and suggests the ways in which this synthesis leads to both a literary and philosophical sense of form and a practical pedagogy for teachers. (MM)

Notes that within certain spheres of international English language education, active student participation is seen as central to the "good" lesson and successful conference. Argues that this idea of participation is generated by a discourse of power belonging to a particular culture of professionalism and that it is ethnocentric and…

Examines why learners of Mandarin use overt nouns and pronouns to a greater extent than native speakers. Findings indicate that no single syntactic structure is a significant contributor to the different rates of optional ellipsis but that some learners use ellipsis only in syntactic contexts permissible in English and most use it in a narrower…

Discusses the semistructured interview as a vehicle to understand the experience of taking an inservice education course in a foreign country through the eyes of the participants. This article demonstrates the details of the process based on two corpora of interviews with teachers of French as a Foreign Language studying in France, and with French…

Discusses conversations between tutor and student in British and Japanese culture, concentrating on face threatening acts such as criticisms, suggestions, and requests. The article distinguishes the attitudes of the "conciliator,""negotiator,""defender,""resigner," and "nonelaborator" and concludes…

Investigates whether children ages 1;6 just beginning to learn words can learn new words in a variety of nonostensive contexts. The results of two studies involving adults interacting with children in games of searching for objects suggest that from very early in language acquisition, children learn words through active attempts to understand…

Presents a case for teaching the discourse-based features of English intonation to improve cross-cultural communication at receptive and productive stages. A systematic approach is suggested for teaching the pragmatic and discourse functions of English intonation through a consciousness-raising methodology that utilizes authentic oral texts. (34…