Proposes the use of a genre-based framework, according to the Swalesian tradition of genre, for the teaching of the organizational structure of academic report writing. An analysis of 15 engineering undergraduate project reports reveals that the problem-solution pattern is prevalent in key sections of these reports and should therefore also be…

Investigates whether the language characteristics of Northern Sotho and English song-texts have any effects on children's singing pitch and whether there are any differences between the Sotho- and English-speaking children's singing pitch. Demonstrates differences in children's singing pitch due to the languages of song-texts and linguistic…

Examines a source of linguistic data--newspapers--and discusses related problems of text-type classification and feature interpretation. Using texts from East Africa as a database, the article assesses the influence of different production contexts on the text composition and analyzes the samples for the multifunctional variable of…

Focuses on how people from different cultures organize and sequence texts in different ways and how students write essays in a second language that follow the rhetorical patterns of their native language. The article describes the types of essays Chinese students must write for the university entrance exam in their home country. (10 references)…

Students received a personalized or nonpersonalized version of a narrated animation explaining how the human respiratory system works. The narration for the nonpersonalized version was in formal style, whereas the narration for the personalized version was in conversational style in which "the" was changed to "your" in 12 places. In 3 experiments,…

The purpose of this essay is to examine how writing has shaped the nature of the Quarterly over 75 years. Here the author explores how stylistic elements have changed over time, how form has interacted with function and content, and how well the resulting text has served the several communities within physical education. He makes the following…

Despite the important role the personal statement plays in the graduate school application processes, little research has been done on its functional features and little instruction has been given about it in academic writing courses. The author conducted a multi-level discourse analysis on a corpus of 30 medical/dental school application letters,…

Language instruction in secondary education is dominated by standard language ideology--a view of language that sanctions one ("standard") variety at the expense of other ("nonstandard") ones. While it is clear that students need access to privileged rhetorical forms, it is similarly clear that most current pedagogies do not facilitate such access…

This article examines ethnographic data that show Belgian adolescents of Moroccan descent stylizing Standard Dutch. Analysis addresses the importance of this variety in Belgian-Flemish society and in the school these boys attended, and shows how in interviews with Moroccan boys the hegemonic status of this variety is generally accepted. In…

Concepts in cognitive psychology are applied to the language used in military situations, and a sentence classification system for use in analyzing military language is outlined. The system is designed to be used, in part, in conjunction with a natural language query system that allows a user to access a database. The discussion of military…

It has been suggested that all speech communities have varieties of simplified speech regarded as appropriate for use with individuals who do not have a full command of a language. These simplified codes are conventionalized within speech communities and are learned by the same process of cultural transmission as other language behaviors. This…

An approach to teaching stylistics, or writing style, to high school and college composition classes is described in this brief article. AUTHOR'S COMMENT (excerpt): Composition teachers generally recognize and appreciate grace in writing. But teaching or learning that grace is difficult at best. Perhaps style cannot easily be taught, but it can be…

The relationship between language and symbolic play was studied in a sample of children identified as referential in style (multiple noun utterances exceeded pronoun or no-noun utterances), as compared with a sample identified as expressive in style (pronoun utterances or no-noun utterances exceeded multiple noun utterances). Children were…

Many current French textbooks and teaching plans (in Germany) cling to obsolete usages and forms (e.g., imperfect subjunctive), as "bon usage," and to "educated" pronunciation. Teachers should teach living, present-day French, rather than the available teaching material. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Refers to important articles from the 1973-74 volume of the Czechoslovak journal "Rusky jazyk." The linguistic portion deals with questions of conversational speech and stylistics. Relevant to teaching Russian are articles on FL teaching installations, factors leading to failure in language learning, and categorizing language errors.…