American foreign policy must operate within the parameters of public opinion, and governmental and non-governmental actors must educate the characteristically alienated citizenry concerning policy issues. Since rational discourse is of limited benefit in the process, advocates instead use verbal representations or metaphor to instill within the…

Eleven texts in Diababawon are presented. Diababawon is a Manobo language of the Indonesian branch of the Malayo-Polynesian family and spoken primarily in the province of Davao del Norte, Mindanao, Philippines. An introductory section describes some aspects of the language's phonology. The texts, which include stories and descriptions of common…

Focusing on teaching situations with varying degrees of teacher knowledge, an interpretive study examined the effects of science teacher subject-matter knowledge on classroom questioning and other forms of discourse. Four biology and life science teachers participated in the first year of two year-long studies (the second is in progress). All of…

Over the past 30 years the study of politics has imitated the discourse of the natural sciences. Articles in this mode of discourse can be characterized as opening with a problem expressed through a review of the literature; continuing with an hypothesis, a methodology, and hypothesis testing; and ending with only narrow conclusions, limited to…

Noting that while student teachers may be well versed in theories of instruction, they frequently lack a particular type of communication competence for the classroom, this paper describes a project for training teachers by using videotapes of teacher/student interaction during reading lessons. The first part of the paper describes the three…

One teacher's experience with traditional language tests suggested that the tests did not reflect the kind of communicative language learning going on in the classroom and might be counterproductive. As a result, an experiment in oral testing was undertaken in which examinees were required to process natural discourse and to relate language to…

Data collected in the course of conversations are used to compare some morpho-syntactic and discourse features of the language of non-English-speaking-background (NESB) and English-speaking-background (ESB) students and their parents. Particular emphasis is given to the processing task facing NESB children if addressed by their parents in…

A study examined young children's use of the Mandarin "jiu" in its adverbial form in conditional sentences. The language corpus included: (1) spontaneous speech samples of 66 children aged 4, 5, 6, and 7 years in 20 Taiwan locations and (2) story repetitions by 461 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds in 22 locations. The data indicate that children…

Classroom based research investigating the actual context of reading requires examination of the texts chosen, the purposes for which they are to be read, the strategies to be used in actually reading them, and, finally, the outcomes expected from reading them. Among the studies that have pioneered research of this kind are (1) those directed by…

A volume combining two special issues of "Papers in Linguistics" contains 10 papers concerning Japanese language use and 12 concerning languages of the U.S.S.R. The papers on Japanese include: "Intrusion in Japanese Conversation,""Japanese Use of English Loans,""Some Discourse Principles and Lengthy Sentences in…

The limitations and advantages of any given measure of performance used to classify students as good or poor readers have not been investigated thoroughly. A study was conducted to determine what happens on several dependent measures of comprehension when the same students are separated into good and poor readers based on different criteria.…

This paper describes how two four-year-old children who are becoming bilingual (Spanish and English) make requests in the classroom. Emerging patterns include: (1) a tendency to rely more heavily on requests for action and attention then requests for information and permission, (2) a tendency to make requests of peers more frequently than of…

Intended for students, teachers, parents, and administrators in charge of educating bilingual children, the monograph provides a summarized account of the information available regarding theories and research in second language acquisition, divided into four chapters. Chapter I is an historical overview of language acquisition theories,…

To test the hypothesis that paragraphs composed of sentences with identical or closely related topics (the grammatical subject and its adjuncts) would be easier to read than a paragraph whose sentence topics were only remotely related, two experiments on the readability of paragraphs were conducted. The first experiment involved subjective…

A study examined student mastery of meaning and use in reading and composing of five formal logical connectors (moreover, accordingly, hence, even so, and still) across school level and class type. Subjects were 100 remedial and nonremedial students from a high school, vocational college, and university who were asked to give a synonym for each…