The process of setting objectives for the reading component of an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course at Suva University in Fiji is described. The course is taken concurrently with a history course whose reading component is integrated into the EAP curriculum and whose specified objectives were to be facilitated by the EAP instruction. The…

A study investigated the effect of discourse style adopted by students on the way in which the assignment was graded. Subjects were three foreign college students, all non-native speakers of English, in an introductory business course. The assignment was a case study of organizational behavior in two competing companies; the students were to…

A study examined a resistant student's interactive discursive practices within a participant framework. Data were taken from observations, audiotapes, and transcripts of teacher-led small group discussions in two sixth-grade classrooms at a public urban middle school. Seven visiting teachers from a university and 56 students in the two classes…

A study investigated patterns in the apparent syntactic errors of native English-speaking, upper-level learners of Arabic as a foreign language. One hundred writing samples, including summaries, criticisms, and free composition, were gathered from a number of university courses. Error types analyzed included articles, subordinate clauses, two-word…

Advanced learners of second languages and natural language processing systems both demand much more detailed lexical information than conventional dictionaries provide. Text composition, whether by humans or machines, requires a thorough understanding of relationships between words, such as selectional restrictions, case patterns, factives, and…

Given that the task of freshman composition is to initiate students into the multidisciplinary academic discourse community, English teachers can speed up the novice's introduction more effectively than can specialists in those disciplines by having students observe, analyze, and produce the salient features of a discourse community's…

The casual conversation of six pairs of Japanese and six pairs of American colleges students was analyzed for evidence of two related aspects of conversation management: the linguistic characteristics of utterance units and back-channel strategies. Utterance units are defined as those occurring between identifiable pauses or breaks in tempo.…

A sample from a teacher-developed instructional television program is used to illustrate some possibilities for the exploitation of videotaped instructional materials in second language teaching. Aspects of the planning of tape production are outlined, and a transcript of the segment is provided. Features of the discourse from linguistic and…

The need for an analytical approach to the study of phatic, metalingual, and metacommunicative functions in asymmetrical communicative situations (between native speakers and language learners) is discussed. The study presents theoretical frameworks for gambits and repairs, the linguistic phenomena that primarily serve those functions, and…

Generally, classroom discourse in foreign language teaching and learning is formalized and does not contain impromptu speech. However, analysis of classroom discourse in a German university foreign language course revealed that teachers' evaluative acts (followups) and "glides" linking one teacher-learner exchange to another do contain…

Focusing on purpose in the writing of college freshmen, a study examined the writing processes and how they related to the conceptions of purpose of four freshmen enrolled in a composition course at Indiana University. Discourse-based interviews were conducted before and after the students completed three tasks designed to vary their choice of…

A classroom observation technique that describes classroom events at the level of activity and analyzes the communicative features of verbal exchanges between students and teachers within each activity is described. Activity characteristics indentified include type, participant organization, content, student modality or skills used, and materials;…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 10 titles deal with the following topics: (1) how speech acts in advertisements relate to the purpose of selling merchandise; (2) the use and evaluation of accounts in problematic episodes; (3) rhetoric as a way of knowing; (4)…

The verbal interaction between a laboratory school class of sixth/seventh grade students and their teacher during 18 social studies discussions was analyzed in order to identify teacher techniques relevant to student discourse and student passivity. Classroom discussions were taped, transcribed, and analyzed according to an adaptation of the…

This study builds on research that identified empirical evidence indicating that at least one language for special purposes (LSP) domain and one non-LSP domain are in fact associated with some differential results in the consequent interlanguage (IL) structure of non-native users of English. The current study focuses on the methodological problems…