Reports on an experiment investigating the modifications in lexicon, grammar, and phonology, made by language teachers as they related to varying levels of proficiency, and are compared to "foreigner talk." (AM)

Investigates target language variability between speaking and writing in the second language acquisition of non-native English speakers. Results reveal that as narrators advance in English proficiency, they develop more abstract content and reported style in speech and writing and that speech and writing become more interactive. (28 references)…

A study examined the outcomes of early bilingualism for majority-language speakers. English and Japanese proficiency of 48 Japanese high school students attending an English-medium international school in Japan were assessed using standardized tests, writing samples, and oral tasks. Students who had received initial schooling in Japanese developed…

Examines group differences in second-language development from perspectives provided by literature on orality and literacy. Results show that university English-as-a-Second-Language students from traditional oral cultures tended to focus on interpersonal involvement in their speaking and writing, and use difficult structures more than students…

Discusses the birthday notices that appear in the advertising section of the Papua New Guinea "Post Courier." The texts of these notices are analyzed from a sociolinguistic perspective, and their context is considered as a register of the variety of English that has become known as Papua New Guinea English. (Author/OD)

A study analyzed and compared the discourse of electronic mail messages from commercial and academic environments. Key text features were examined for style and convention patterns. Results suggest commercial messages follow normal conventions for standard written business English, and academic users may view the medium as a pseudo-conversational…

Communication difficulties in multicultural clinical settings can be exacerbated by translators, but their actual impact on medical decisions has not been systematically evaluated. This study sought to determine the influence of translators participating in clinical encounters in which English-speaking clinicians offered amniocentesis to…

This paper discusses findings from an extensive project examining gender, language and computer-mediated communication (CMC) in the context of undergraduate psychology courses. The contributions of 197 introductory psychology students (148 females, 49 males) participating in asynchronous CMC as part of their course were collated and coded for…

It is argued that assessment of student writing can be enhanced by adoption of a functional approach to linguistic analysis; through their research, functional grammarians have provided language teachers with criteria for evaluating the extent to which learners have gained control of the grammatical and discourse features of a variety of…

Language attrition research usually attempts to elicit all types of usage from speakers of all fluency levels in a dying language in order to abstract changing linguistic patterns from situational variation. Informants adept at hiding their vernacular and improvising in an obsolescing variety are reluctant to admit to such scrutiny. In a…

Essays examine development of the English language from Old English to the present, characteristics and use of contemporary varieties, and what the language means to speakers around the world. "English Voices" (Joan Swann) raises issues and questions about variation in English, to be addressed in later chapters. "English Manuscripts: The Emergence…

A study investigated whether male and female tutors, as institutional representatives, use the same pragmatic features in their language. Ten graduate-student writing tutors, five male and five female, were recorded in sessions with both male and female students at a university writing center. Transcripts were analyzed for turn transition type…

This paper describes a coding system devised to analyze conversations of graduate students in applied linguistics at Edinburgh University. The system was devised to test the hypothesis that as shared knowledge among conversation participants grows, the textual density of in-group members has more cues than that of strangers. The informal…

A study sought to determine differences in politeness strategies used in requests by American college students (N=80), Japanese students in the United States (N=34), and Japanese students in Japan (N=103). Subjects rated 61 requests in four different situations (differing in terms of addressee level and interrogative, declarative, and imperative…

This narrative recommends a communication design for educators to use during a variety of interactions. The strategy consists of nine components: (1) greeting/introduction (the speaker's introductory remarks should establish physical comfort, a pleasant feeling, and a professional tone); (2) anticipatory set (establishing a mind set for content to…