Analysis of verbal and cognitive activities between and among students and faculty during 30 postconference sessions indicated that faculty used a student-centered model to structure conferences and encourage students' verbal participation. Faculty are encouraged to coach for cognition by monitoring cognitive levels in discourse to encourage…

Describes how disability studies can be used in a medical and science writing class to critically examine the assumptions of scientific discourse. Discusses how disability studies draws on feminist, postmodern, and post-colonial theory and extends their critiques to the medicalization of disability. Discusses sample disability-related classroom…

Investigates the quantitative and qualitative evolution of debate-creating vs. accounting references in 90 French medical articles published between 1810 and 1995. Suggests that nineteenth-century French academic writing tends to be more polemical or oppositional than cooperative by contrast to its twentieth-century counterpart. Suggests that the…

Argues that many family melodramas in films of the '80s and '90s focus their narrative on the negative dynamics of the parental relationship. Identifies underlying generic patterns and ideas found in these films. Explores representations of mothers, fathers, and children; gender representation and codependency; and familial dysfunction. Broadens…

Examines how children's written work is enhanced through "teachable" lessons, where the teacher draws attention explicitly to aspects of literary texts and where children explore and evaluate literature through group reading and discussion. Explores the relationship between group evaluations of texts and children's writing development with…

Presents one of a set of five analyses that all examine the same data; the discourse of a problem-based learning group in medicine. Offers an overview of the five analyses, including how they differ. Includes a transcription of the six-minute data segment featuring a group of second-year medical students and a faculty tutor/coach discussing a…

Contributes to scholarship advancing the understanding of human communication by elaborating a theoretical framework for understanding the synthesis of self-definition and social advocacy in social movement autobiographies. Uses insights from Kenneth Burke and posits that in a rhetorically effective movement autobiography, form enables the…

Uncritical acceptance of the discourses of government economic policies is counterproductive to the development of teamwork and flexible skills due to the insecurity they create. Therefore, discourse analysis should be a crucial element in adult education and training. (SK)

Proposes a model of the search term selection process based on an empirical study of professional searchers during the pre-online search stage; the model characterizes the selection of search terms as the navigation of different discourses. Six discourses emerged as sources of search terms: controlled vocabularies; documents and the domain; the…

Surveys young business practitioners regarding challenging work-related communication episodes. Reports primarily face-to-face oral events requiring the respondent to function as an advocate or to manage conflict. Notes that both gender and first language correlated with responses. Calls for management communication courses to give attention to…

Examined the role of textual constraints, rather than previous knowledge, in resolving lexical ambiguities in second-language learning. Twenty ambiguous words with differing Portuguese translations were selected, disambiguated based on collocation, and tested with a concordancer, using a 20,000,000-word English language corpus of expository text.…

Using sociocultural theory as a conceptual framework, this study examined selected features of student discourse of three pairs of third-semester learners of Spanish at the university level. Specifically the study investigated how these selected features, identified in an earlier research project, developed during opportunities to engage in five…

Discussion of the multilingual mind's organization proposes the Least Expansion Hypothesis, that knowledge of any language is organized in the same cognitive manner. A slot is created for knowledge of each level of language, storing knowledge of all languages pertaining to that level. A new knowledge unit is entered only when differing…

A study of interactions among 15 students in a computer-mediated graduate course found no sexist language or overt exclusionary behavior. However, women exercised less procedural leadership and influence on group products and had fewer productive contributions. (Author/SK)

Explores the notion that some social interactions are more conducive to the construction of knowledge than others. Describes the use of argumentation as a learning tool during play by analyzing transcripts of the interactions of four-and-a-half year olds. Derives implications for early childhood education from these examples and from a theoretical…