This paper investigates native speaker (NS) and non-native speaker (NNS) interaction in the workplace in computer-mediated communication (CMC). Based on empirical data from a 10-month email exchange between a medium-sized British company and a small-sized Italian company, the general aim of this study is to explore the nature of the intercultural…

Many children find school tests difficult, but children who are deaf or hard of hearing may find them especially so. Reports from the 2008 Test Equity Summit indicate that disproportionate numbers of students who are deaf or hard of hearing at all grade levels are failing critically important tests even though their classroom work may show that…

In this article, I examine literacy artifacts placed by students in different locations of a state-run secondary school in the city of Madrid, Spain. The data were gathered as part of a two-year long multilevel ethnography focused on the social and academic trajectories of immigrant students in Spanish compulsory secondary education. The analysis…

Academic literacies research has tended to focus on writers in context, while systemic functional linguistic research has tended to focus on texts in context. While literacy practices and written texts may be usefully analysed independently, this paper describes how an investigation of genres of academic writing in the BAWE (British Academic…

The aim of the study was to demonstrate the style of text language used by Finnish pre-teen texters (n = 65) and determine how their text language related to their traditional literacy skills, and compare descriptively these results with earlier results from work with young English texters. Three kinds of text messages (natural texts, elicited…

Among many great American writers, Hemingway is famous for his objective and terse prose style. As all the novels Hemingway published in his life, "The Old Man and the Sea" typically reflects his unique writing style. The language is simple and natural on the surface, but actually deliberate and artificial. Hemingway's style is related…

As an area of research that continues to develop, the study of linguistics worldwide presents the opportunity for the improvement of cross-cultural communication through education and research. Language educators are charged with the task of instructing students to effectively communicate across cultures in a multi-lingual world. The…

Over the past few years, the notion of "facilitation" has been increasingly gaining attention and acceptance in Japan, especially in the context of education and training. Today, Japanese educators think and talk about facilitation, even if it is not yet clear what facilitation is. Interestingly enough, the term "facilitation"…

The stereotypical view of professional academic writing is that it is grammatically complex, with elaborated structures, and with meaning relations expressed explicitly. In contrast, spoken registers, especially conversation, are believed to have the opposite characteristics. Our goal in the present paper is to challenge these stereotypes, based…

Although Erving Goffman did not turn his analytic focus specifically toward language until later in his career, his work, beginning with "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life," has been crucial for discourse analysts and interactional sociolinguists who study language in social context. Perhaps most influential have been his concepts of…

This study proposes to expand the scope of oral communication across the curriculum research by exploring oral genres in a dietetics curriculum from the perspective of the dietetics faculty. The goals of this qualitative study, couched within the communication in the disciplines framework, are to identify the oral genres integral to the study and…

This study utilizes a pre-test/post-test assessment to investigate the instructional efficacy of a genre-based approach to teaching summary writing. Forty-one EFL university students in Taiwan were asked before and after the instruction to summarize a simplified version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in a maximum of 500 words. All the students'…

The view of academic discourse as a rhetorical activity involving interactions between writers and readers is now central to most perspectives on EAP, but these interactions are conducted differently in different disciplinary and generic contexts. In this paper I use the term "proximity" to refer to a writer's control of those rhetorical features…

This exploratory analysis examined the nature of asynchronous, text-based communication in peer-directed educational discussions. The nature of communication changed over time and women exhibited greater tendency for epistolary communication than men. Initial posts, which were expository in nature, focused on disseminating information whereas…

This longitudinal study explores linkages between patterns of mother-child conversation as events unfold and children's subsequent event memory reports. Eighty-nine mother-child dyads took part in novel "adventures" in their homes when the children were 36 and 42 months old. In contrast to "low joint talk" dyads, the conversations of "high joint…