Investigates whether business executives and business communication academics were bothered by examples of perceived errors in grammar or usage. Finds usage elements that troubled readers most were basic sentence-structure errors (run-ons, fragments, nonparallel structure, and danglers); several usage errors may be in transition to acceptability;…

Emphasizes kinship systems and language choice among academics in a multilingual capital in India. Interviews with 17 faculty members reveal reasons why some parents use English with their children at home. (Author/VWL)

This article presents the results of two ethnographic studies that explored the language and literacy practices present in the everyday lives of seven Dominican families living in the New York City metropolitan area. The families engaged in literacy practices that were embedded in their daily lives and often depended on the practical problems that…

This paper makes a usage-based contribution to the learning and teaching of German via the tools of contrastive learner corpus analysis (Granger, 1998; Granger, Hung, and Petch-Tyson, 2002; Nesselhauf, 2004). On the basis of an integrated learner and native speaker corpus of "telecollaborative" discourse (Belz, 2005), an empirically rich…

This study examined 122 high academic achieving Mexican American seniors from 7 schools in South Texas. The results found that fathers' education, families' equal use of English and Spanish, family support of students' growth into areas of their own particular interests, and students' openness to experience had the highest correlations with…

This article looks at the way language subtly shapes and constrains the way we perceive reality. It examines one term-parental involvement. This apparently simple and democratic term serves as a portfolio of meanings that separate and divide. It illustrates two of these meanings, which take the form of a conjoined metaphor of "full/empty", or…

Many students are unsuccessful in the study of school mathematics, not because of some innate ability, but because of pedagogical practices. Bernstein (1996) has argued that pedagogy serves as a mechanism for cultural reproduction, so that for those students whose cultures are different from that represented in and through pedagogy, the task of…

This article reports on an investigation into the loss of morphology expressing temporality in the Italian of second generation Italo-Australians. The purpose of the study is to verify whether the loss of Italian tense and aspect morphology proceeds from marked to unmarked, where markedness is defined on the basis of formal and semantic criteria.…

The domains of application in applied linguistics have changed considerably since the early 1960s. In most of these domains, the fundamental property of language as "a resource for making meaning" has increasingly been foregrounded. This approach recognises, amongst other dimensions of language, its multi-stratal character, i.e. that a given…

Purpose: The primary purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the influence of context on interaction patterns used by mothers who are homeless with their preschool children during book-reading and game-playing activities. The impact of mothers' previously determined language functioning on their contextual use of facilitating language…

The Irish language has long been regarded in the popular mind as a correlate of Irish nationalism. A model expounded by the sociolinguist, Joshua Fishman, is applied to the evolution of Irish as a nationalist icon, and it is demonstrated that its divisive potential developed only gradually. In fact, it was an object of affection and admiration for…

Structural variables differentiating kinship identities, such as sex, generation, and type of relationship (lineal, collateral, conjugal), are reflected in sentiments about family identities. In particular, componential variations in kinship terms predict Evaluation, Potency, and Activity ratings of the terms fairly accurately. Between 44 and 92…

This paper reports an investigation into the language used by writers of grammar of English and learners' awareness of it. Two key features of this genre are whether and how writers present themselves in the text ("personality") and whether and to what extent they qualify their statements via the use of modality. Two comparable texts, one from a…

This research describes and analyses the type of verbal discourse and interactions among the children in a group-solving situation. Two groups of five children ages 6, 7 and 8, from two different cultures, were observed: one at an English-speaking summer camp in Beirut, Lebanon, and another at a parallel site, a neighbourhood group in Kentucky, in…

This paper deals with the author's recent work on political, sociolinguistic and educational aspects of bilingual and immersion education in Australia. Among the cases considered are: the development of a professional position statement on bilingual and immersion education, to be disseminated to policy makers; advising on an Auslan (Australian…