A study exploring native English-speakers' and advanced Chinese English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners' beliefs about how a face-threatening speech act, refusal, should be expressed is reported. The two major research questions of the study were: how native speakers of English and Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) differ in their…

The communicative language teaching approach is described, its theoretic history is reviewed, and classroom techniques are presented. The origins of the approach are found in research on the development of linguistic competence. Characteristics of the approach include: the goals of language use for communication; use of real-life communicative…

This study investigated the discourse strategies used by native speakers of Turkish in carrying out speech acts of correction and disagreement to status-unequal interlocutors. Focus was on: (1) the politeness markers preferred for softening the impact of words in face-threatening speech situations where the interlocutor corrects the mistake of an…

A study examines two major types of vowel systems in languages, centripetal and centrifugal. English is associated with the centripetal system, in which vowel quality and quantity (rhythm) are heavily influenced by stress. In this system, vowels have a strong tendency to move toward the center of the vowel area. Spanish is associated with the…

American students are exposed to many different romanization systems when learning Chinese. The most important systems include Pinyin, Zhuyin fuhao, Wade-Giles, Gwoyeu Romatzhy, and the Yale system, to name just a few. The Pinyin system, which is built on the English alphabet, is the official transliteration system of mainland China. The Zhuyin…

An analysis of story telling in Konni, a language spoken in Ghana, focused on how the climax of a story is characterized. The texts studied are six oral folk tales; two are appended, and portions of all are used as illustrations in the text of the report. First, the definition and characteristics of "peak," or climax of a story are…

Papers in this volume include the following: "Constraints on Dative Acquisition by Chinese ESL Learners" (Hua Dong Fan); "The Learnability of Locality Conditions on Quantification" (Thomas Lee); "Do Learning Environments Make a Difference? A Study on the Acquisition of the English Interrogatives by Three Types of Cantonese…

This volume brings together the insights of more than 40 contributors who demonstrate that anthropology has timely, important, and enduring messages for students and the public. The book provides the first comprehensive examination of teaching issues across all the subfields of anthropology since the 1963 publication of "The Teaching of…

The nature of research on speech communication in asymmetrical interactions, such as those between a speech therapist and patient, is discussed and some general approaches to therapy are noted. The situation of the aphasic is then considered, in which intervention is particularly difficult due to the lack of some important aspects of interpersonal…

A study analyzed the relationship between foreign language learning and four variables, including: nonverbal intelligence, conceptual level, mother tongue, and mathematics. The aim of the study was to investigate whether the same mental processes are involved in poor and good language learning, regardless of the learner's mother tongue. The study…

A review of the literature of second language teaching suggests that a significant gap exists between linguistic theory and language teaching practice. However, psycholinguistics has influenced development of language teaching policies to the extent that many language teachers have advanced a more semantic, social, and communicative view of…

The key role that language and language policy play in relation to education, culture, and multiculturalism was emphasized throughout the plenary and workshop discussions of the 43rd Session of the International Conference on Education, convened by UNESCO in September, 1992. This paper reports the roundtable discussions of this meeting. The…

A discussion of language testing looks at the relationship between the processes of language learning and language testing, particularly from the point of view of pragmatics theory. It outlines some of the theory of Charles Sanders Pierce and its role in the evolution of linguistic theory, as well as the work of other theorists concerning the…

This study attempts to identify what mechanisms might be used to reduce gender bias in two highly inflected languages, Greek and Arabic. Twenty native speakers of Greek and Arabic attending Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., were surveyed for the experiment. The students were: (1) asked to read a standard job announcement in their native…

Five papers on linguistics contained in this issue include the following: "Tones for Profoundly Deaf Tone-Language Speakers" (Teresa Y. C. Ching), a study using a simplified speech pattern approach to enhance perception of tonal contrasts in Cantonese; "Word Formation and the Limits of Analytic Equivalence" (Peter Crisp), a…