A study examined the validity of the distinction between interactional language, used to express social relations and personal attitudes, and transactional language, which conveys factual or prepositional information and is message oriented, within and across languages and cultures. Data were drawn from natural telephone conversations of three…

A study examined first-year students' out-of-class lives, focusing on the "potentially rich" environment created when students who are enrolled in a first-year seminar also live together. The students observed were members of the University of Vermont's Living and Learning Center. Both the living environment and the class were designed…

This brochure discusses, in lay terms, the degree to which language shapes thought. The first section describes briefly the questions that linguists have addressed in studying this issue, including how things such as location or time may be conceptualized differently in different language groups, offering examples from other languages in addition…

The controversial field of semiotics has been criticized for its "unwillingness to respect boundaries" and its "conviction that everything is a sign." The central concerns of this wide-ranging field, however, can be defined, and its implications for teaching can be outlined. Semiotics is the study of signs (symbols, icons, and…

Contextualizing reality is the final goal of academic pursuit, and in college level language studies, a key goal should always be to make students aware of what they already know. The words used by humans are either organizational, functional words, or they are related to cultural literacy. Cultural literacy is a body of knowledge that all people…

Many linguists, sociologists, and educators see the nonstandard form of speech used by African-American students as a substandard, imperfect copy of Standard English (SE), marred by a number of careless and ignorant errors, rather than as something to be studied and understood in its own right. Many African-American college students continue to…

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…

A study investigated the choice of language (French, English, or Italian) for different activities and with different individuals among second-generation Italians in Quebec through interviews with 12 adults. The report first provides a sociolinguistic profile of the subjects and identifies the social factors associated with language choice in…

Two exercises were developed to demonstrate how Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of novelistic language and creative interpretation are instrumental in teaching students to read creatively. The text chosen for these exercises was "Crime Against Nature" by Minnie Bruce Pratt. According to Bakhtin's scheme, a fiction can be read most…

While the debate over the role of metaphor in language, thought, and meaning is not new, in the past decade there has been a move among organizational scholars to use metaphors in critical research. This paper presents a review of one area of the existing literature on metaphor--that dealing primarily with the nonliteral view of metaphors within…

Increasingly, language is seen as the interpretive medium by which knowledge is constructed and communication is carried out within and across disciplines, as well as the way power and authority are exercised, renewed, and protected. This paper explores the prospects of raising awareness of this social and political view of language across the…

Noting that many instructors involved in teaching writing to students of differing cultural backgrounds seek to pinpoint the origin of the differences in communication between the form of written language conveyed to students and that which they use in their everyday language, this paper recommends ethnography to provide evidence as to what is…

Second language teaching is viewed from the perspective that its core objective is to teach the cultural context of discourse in the target language, rather than to teach the traditional four language skills and culture as a fifth component. The discussion begins with an examination of the context of communication within the classroom, suggesting…

This paper examines the work of Russian literary critic M. M. Bakhtin as a theory of reading. Focusing on two critical essays, "Discourse in the Novel" and "The Problem of Speech Genres," the paper demonstrates how Bakhtin addresses the three elements of a reading theory--language, representation, and interpretation. Next, the…

Framed by the rising costs of traditional scholarly publishing and the increasing restrictions on library budgets, the turn to electronic publishing seems to be the way of the future, according to the publisher of an electronic journal, "Surfaces." Costs and delays of production and distribution are massively reduced. The electronic…