A study investigated how a television talk show host manipulates the social and psychological distances in the television show context to entertain guests and audience. An ethnographic approach was taken to the research, and analysis focused on the use of politeness strategies and face-saving and face-threatening interactions. The television talk…

For much of this century, text linguists have recognized that various tokens called "metadiscourse" may help explain how texts function. In linguistics, metadiscourse has a more concrete meaning than it typically does in composition: it refers to specific words, phrases, and clauses which are primarily intended to help the reader…

The goal of genre theory is to construct useful similarities between different texts. It is the meaning-making practices of a community, and particularly its system of intertextuality that determine which possible similarities will count as significant. Whether educators approach genre as a rule or a resource is a moral choice. Rules restrict,…

An analysis of two French-English business dictionaries, a 1989 revised edition and a 1990 edition, looks at a number of weaknesses in the resources' design and content. First, problems are found in transcriptions of pronunciation that do not reflect actual usage when it differs from convention and in lack of attention to pronunciation of words…

This annotated bibliography includes citations of journal articles and book chapters that focus on current theories related to teaching grammar in English-as-a-Second-Language and English-as-a-Foreign-Language classrooms. Citations include: (1) "Field Independence-Dependence and the Teaching of Grammar" (R. G. Abraham); (2) "Making…

A discussion of Bolanci (also Bole or Bolewa), a West Chadic language spoken in northeastern Nigeria, focuses on one component of the system of complementation, the form "na." This form has an inherent semantic capable of influencing the meaning of sentences in which it is embedded, specifically, when present in a complex sentence,…

A study examined traditional Hindi songs typically sung by women during north Indian weddings, using pragmatic and semantic analysis. Some historical and cultural background for the practice of women's singing at weddings is offered. It is suggested that gender roles are defined and regulated through the language of this speech event, and that…

Sound symbolism is the study of the relationship between the sound of an utterance and its meaning. In this interdisciplinary collection of new studies, 24 leading scholars discuss the role of sound symbolism in a theory of language. Contributions and authors include the following: "Sound-Symbolic Processes" (Leanne Hinton, Johanna…

The importance of training second language learners in the patterns of occurrence of certain phonemes is discussed, focusing on the use of spelling as a primary predictor of pronunciation. Four different pronunciations of "ng" in English (as in "engaging, singer, changing, dangle") are used to illustrate this principle. A review of pronunciation…

The work of connectionist researchers is examined in order to understand better the implications for modeling second language learning processes. Connectionism is a biologically-oriented framework for understanding complex behavior, and provides a modeling tool (computer simulation) that behaves and learns without rules being explicitly wired into…

A study examined the stages of acquisition of Spanish definite articles by two groups of English-speaking learners enrolled in their first semester of Spanish. The approach taken was to analyze writing samples produced by the groups at different times during the semester, to obtain the basis for a pseudo-longitudinal analysis of article usage. The…

The lexical approach to teaching Russian grammar is explained, an instructional sequence is outlined, and a classroom study testing the effectiveness of the approach is reported. The lexical approach draws on research on cognitive psychology, second language acquisition theory, and research on learner language. Its bases in research and its…

A discussion of communicative task-based second language learning looks at what differentiates a number of related classroom approaches: (1) two orientations, one focusing on learning-to-communicate and the other on communicating-to-learn; (2) emphasis on input, reception, and analysis in contrast to emphasis on communicative tasks; (3)…

While little attention has been given in historiography to the language of historical narrative, and the role language plays in portraying history, the discipline of linguistics, and particularly the subdisciplines of discourse analysis and functional linguistics, have given increasing attention to the discourse of history. Recently, a group of…

A study investigated whether English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) students' understanding of culturally-loaded words (those that are similar in primary meaning but different in connotation between the two languages) approximates that of native speakers of English, and how much English proficiency level may account for the extent of this…