Examines the effects of teachers' language on initial impressions and uncertainty reduction in the university classroom. States that language was operationalized using powerful and powerless forms. Finds that teachers using powerful language forms were rated consistently higher than those who used powerless forms, and that differences were also…

The distribution of variants of the FACE and GOAT vowels in Tyneside English (TE) is assessed with reference to the age, sex, and social class of 32 adult TE speakers. Effects of phonological context and speaking style are also examined. Patterns in the data are suggestive of dialect leveling, whereby localized speech variants become recessive and…

In-depth interviews with 34 English immigrants living in the "Anglophilic" eastern United States examined the social status of various English accents, anxiety engendered by creeping Americanization of their accents, how they coped with claiming an identity undermined by changing accents, and mechanisms to distance themselves from…

Focuses on genre and its application in language teaching and learning. Suggests genre approaches have had an impact on how we understand discourse and transform literacy education in different contexts around the world. Describes studies on generic integrity and variation, and the ways that genres are seen as similar and different in terms of…

Investigated the influence of gender on certain linguistic strategies that promote camaraderie, specifically in the discourse of Chilean Spanish speakers. Gender was not found to play a completely determining role, although male and female strategy preferences were exhibited. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on the usefulness of corpus-based analysis to discover linguistic patterns selected and favored by a specific genre. Results show that the frameworks "the . . . of,""A . . . of," and "be . . .to," when used in medical papers, enclose restricted sets of lexical items and that the selection of specific…

Argues that corpus-based text analysis should be going beyond the analysis of lexicogrammatical features to investigate the specific genre features of text. A study of politeness strategies used by Finns, Americans, and Belgians in a learner corpus of letters of application found that Americans tended to be much more patterned--even formulaic--in…

Reports on an analysis of research article introductions from two related fields, Wildlife Behavior and Conservation Biology, using Swales' (1990), "Genre Analysis. English in Academic and Research Settings." Results of the analysis reveal disciplinary variation in the structure of this genre, which has important pedagogical implications.…

Investigates the role of visual communication in a spoken research genre: the scientific research paper. Analyzes 2,048 visuals projected during 90 papers given at five international conferences in three fields (Geology, medicine, physics), in order to bring out the recurrent features of the visual dimension. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the consequences of the dominance of English for a small language like Swedish and a small country like Sweden. Presents a survey of contrastive studies, which reveal that texts and writing in the mother tongue differ between cultures. Discusses studies of the current situation in Sweden, which reveal a serious threat towards certain…

Investigates the learning of sociostylistic variation by students in French immersion programs in Ontario. Focused on their learning of the four expressions of restriction ("ne . . .que,""seulement,""rien que," and "juste"). (Author/VWL)

This article examines the dialectical nature of Mikhail Bakhtin's developmental understanding of language learning. In particular, the author discusses the pedagogically illuminating relationship between literary style and everyday style, especially as the latter emerges from and returns to lived life. Drawing parallels with other related…

One can ask four questions about genre validity across cultures. Does a certain form or configuration occur in the culture in question? Is it acceptable? If acceptable, is it in practice preferred? Is it recommended by prescriptive authorities? This paper reports the results of an attempt to answer these questions empirically by testing the…

The narrative concepts of the implied author and implied reader elucidate how business texts represent writers and readers. It is important, though, to distinguish carefully between writers' "implications" and readers' "inferences." Instructors should contrast implied versus inferred writers and readers, provide multiple ways to comprehend these…

This article evaluates the efficacy of explicit genre-based instruction by sensitizing the ESL learners to the concept of genre. The main questions addressed are: How does sensitizing ESL learners to the rhetorical move structure of a genre, the communicative purposes of these moves, and linguistic features that realize these moves help them to…