Examines the language of writing groups at fifth, eighth, and eleventh grade levels to determine what students say when they critique one another's work. Analysis of idea units revealed that the highest proportion focused on the content of writing. The rubric for coding ideas is appended. (HOD)

Describes two experiments which assessed the ability of adult second language (L2) learners to produce and comprehend real, unreal, and past unreal English conditional sentences. Developmental differences are analyzed in relation to distinctive features. The analyses lend support to the explanatory power of markedness theory in explaining L2…

Analyzes some examples of classroom interaction from observation of English as a second language (ESL) teachers in Japanese classrooms. Analysis of the data shows that lessons often seem to pass from meaningless activity to silence and that ESL teachers continue to emphasize form over meaning and accuracy over communication. (SED)

Attempts to identify the linguistic and situational features of officialese, the language register of public administration. Suggests that any situation-type is a complex of five dimensions which collectively define its register: setting, participants, instrumentality, context, and purpose. Reports an analysis of 50 administrative letters in…

Discusses research in semantic processing and narrative discourse by psycholinguists, applied linguists, and speech pathologists. Focuses on children's comprehension of the language of instruction and contrasts normal and disordered comprehension and performance. Presents excerpts from two language evaluations that utilize some recent approaches…

Describes a study which attempts to place the problem of second language learning and use by bilingual children into a framework of double socialization through the analysis of mother-child and peer group interaction. Ukrainian and Greek second generation mothers and their children aged 5-6 years were observed in four sessions. (SED)

Presents a study of foreigner talk (FT) in a minority language (Welsh) in a bilingual community and describes some of the most prominent features of Welsh FT. FT is defined as a simple form of a language used by native speakers to communicate with non-proficient speakers of the language. (SED)

Eighteen experimental corpora of spontaneous speech in five languages (English, Finnish, French, German, and Spanish) were examined under hypothesis that they are characterized by commonalities in use of time. Each study, based on story telling elicited by pictures, confirmed hypothesis. In addition, further support for hypothesis was found by…

Describes a study that analyzes narratives of sixth- and ninth-grade students for differences between male and female in T-unit length, clause length, and number of clauses per T-unit. No significant differences were found in the words per T-unit, the words per clause, or the use of verb extensions. (SED)

A French short story is used to illustrate several possible levels of study for a single literary text: linguistic analysis, textual analysis, and analysis of uses of the romantic form. The approach suggested integrates these levels so that each is enriched by the perspectives offered by the others. (MSE)

While the significance of validation of data collection instruments in speech act research has been recognized and has attracted considerable interest, most validation studies employed a between-subjects design. In so doing, it is possible that the differences were caused by the group effects rather than different data collection techniques. This…

This study explored how children are socialized through discipline in the preschool classroom. Using detailed descriptions of teacher-student interactions and an interpretive method, the study mapped the process of the children's socialization and the role of discipline. The case study in one 4-year-olds' room examined early socialization…

This paper describes the communicative situation of 17 Mexican immigrant women in San Diego County (California), focusing on a set of narratives of personal language experiences in everyday life. Data collection included intensive fieldwork in an adult computer literacy project serving predominantly Mexican immigrants and interviews with seven…

A study examined repair in native-nonnative (Mandarin) speaker English conversation, focusing primarily on the previously unobserved lexical element "yeah" which occurs in a speaker's ongoing or same turn at talk. Conversational analysis was used to examine the data collected and transcribed. The data was composed of roughly 120 pages of…

A classroom method used to develop advanced English-as-a-second-language students' appreciation for a literary work, ability to do close text analysis, and general language skills is described. The four-session procedure uses a short story and careful sequence of teacher questioning. In the first session, students are prepared to understand the…