An ethnographic and linguistic study conducted at a high-technology corporation examined decision-making in managerial meetings, focusing on the effects of silences following a proposal on the maker of the proposal. An opinion is that such silences signify a negative evaluation of the proposal, inviting the proposal maker to alter his position.…

A study focused attention on the academic personas acquired by two AAVE-oriented (African American Vernacular English) beginning writers as reflected by their speech in informal settings and the style they employed in academic tasks. The study explores the degree to which literacy experiences (home and school) affect students' lives. It was guided…

A study compared (1) data on rejections of advice by native and non-native speakers collected from natural conversation with (2) data collected from a discourse completion task (DCT). Subjects were students in an academic advising session (13 native speakers, 11 non-native speakers of English) who responded to a DCT and students (18 native…

Two samples of college student writing, paragraphs from freshman compositions, are analyzed for presence or absence of two characteristics of literate prose, decontextualization and autonomy. Writing is decontextualized and autonomous when whatever is needed for its comprehension is included in the words of the text, and comprehension is not…

An analysis of the use of language in a social service context using microethnographic research techniques is described. The study examined a single interaction between a welfare caseworker and a client as they address the client's employment and educational options. The interaction was videotaped and a segment of just over a minute was analyzed…

This conference presentation is offered as a prolegomenon, or introduction, to a paper and research project. The issues of whether prolegomena are modernist explanatory devices and whether postmodern prolegomena are possible are discussed. The paper proposes a research inquiry into "postmodern teaching" initiated through the metaphor of…

An analysis of oral and written discourse focuses on the hypothesis that marked structures serve to code discourse boundaries and signal the advent of new discourse units. The hypothesis is examined against three independent sets of data: (1) discourse from a larger study, in which subjects provided oral or written narrative descriptions, in…

A study explored the reliability of methods for analyzing the thematic organization of texts. Five linguists, two of whom were native speakers of Swedish and three of whom were native speakers of Finnish, analyzed the thematic organization of a Swedish popular scientific article, using an analysis that focused on coherence reflected in the…

Eighteen works, including summaries, are cited in this bibliography. Topics include the nature of medical encounters; power, gender, and discourse change in physician-patient interviews; women's language in the medical interview; nurses' communication with physicians; and language patterns in therapeutic change. (JP)

A discussion of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) writing instruction focuses on cultural factors that influence Chinese students' composition and that may be misconstrued as poor writing techniques. It is argued that the different rhetorical conventions that ESL students incorporate into their English writing are based in the deeper and broader…

A study categorized self-perceptions of subjects regarding their feelings about initial communication interaction. Using Q-Technique, a total of 138 subjects, mostly students at a midsized, midwestern, urban university enrolled in interpersonal communication courses, were studied through the use of two structured Q-sorts containing statements…

A framework is presented for syllabus design in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) instruction. A case is given for a discourse level focus in the ESL classroom, from beginning stages of learning through advanced levels. Following this, three rhetorical modes (critical analysis of fiction, truth-searching logical conversation, and classical…

A study investigated translation problems arising in physician-patient interviews conducted in two languages with the help of an interpreter. Subjects were four adult native speakers of Gujarati, aged 42-70, whose physician interviews were videotape-recorded and translated, and the discourse was analyzed. Patients spoke in Gujarati, and the…

This study examined the strategies that 12 kindergarten and first-grade French immersion students in Ontario developed for oral communication and the contexts of such communication. Over the course of the school year each student was videotaped once a month in various classroom settings. The transcriptions of student conversations and utterances…

Current theory posits that comprehension and meaning involve not only text but also what the reader brings to the text and the contextual elements of the reading. A study investigated how eight students in grade 9 read and created meaning from short story assignments in their English classrooms. Concurrent think-aloud protocols from four short…