The European Commission supports critical inquiry for developing knowledge-based flexible skills. However, in Greece the highly centralized education system dictates curriculum, instruction, materials, and assessment decisions. Teachers are unable to have meaningful involvement in educational policy making. (SK)

Describes literature conversations as complex adaptive systems. Discusses four research studies from this perspective, and explains some assertions about this conceptual framework as a tool for teacher researchers. (SR)

When Japan surrendered in 1945, General MacArthur demanded that the Japanese adopt his draft of a new Americanized Constitution. This article focuses on one of the 11 chapters of the Japanese Constitution, Chapter 1 "The Emperor." Discourse analysis is used to examine portions of MacArthur's draft compared with its Japanese translation.…

Offers a starting point for focusing research on the value of computer-mediated interactions for language development in instructional activities. (Author/VWL)

Language planning confronts a situation in which human rights have become inclusive in theory but remain exclusive in practice, often deploying language or language varieties as pretexts for exclusion. This article suggests that language planning should promote a dialectic between inclusive theories and inclusive practices within its own projects…

Describes the design and construction of Resume Automatique a Fragments Indicateurs (RAFI), a system of automatic text summary which sums up scientific and technical texts. The RAFI system transforms a long source text into several versions of more condensed texts, using discourse analysis, to make searching easier; it could be adapted to the…

Examines the public discourse of McDonald's and the Environmental Defense Fund's alliance. Shows that both partners drew from the emerging discourse of market environmentalism and from the older paradigm of command and control. Argues that this rhetorical ambivalence is emblematic of the contemporaneous sociopolitical conflict over how the…

Examines how children (ages 6-7 and 10-11) interpret and respond to representations of sexual behavior on television and how they define what is appropriate for themselves and for children in general. Examines, through discourse analysis, how children's discussions of these issues serve as a form of "identity work," through which they…

Documents use of informant-made video (IMV) recordings as a data collecting method for research into adults' art viewing experiences. Compares 10 informants' videotaped accounts of their responses to works of art with audiotaped responses. Reveals that IMVs provided additional information, such as visual documentation of artwork. Concludes with a…

Shows that getting involved with a story is the primary dimension of story appreciation, and that different readers interact with the same story in different ways. Indicates that the first-person grammatical device invites readers to identify with the main character, but whether or not they do is a complex function of story properties,…

Introduces this special issue which describes several approaches to semantic knowledge representations. Discusses the various quantitative procedures employed in the articles, noting that they can also serve as theoretical approaches to knowledge representation. (SR)

Describes a computational model of high-dimensional context space: the Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL). Shows that HAL provides sufficient information to make semantic, grammatical, and abstract distinctions. Demonstrates the cognitive compatibility of the representations with human processing; and introduces a new methodology that extracts…

Offers an introduction to the theory and implementation of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text. Gives an overview of applications and modeling of human knowledge to which LSA has been applied. (SR)

Suggests that despite intuitively evident connections, there are difficulties with identifying language as a significant cause of conflict escalation. By looking at links between language, discourse, conflict, and conflict resolution, this article aims to see of a discussion of these four key terms can contribute to a better understanding of…

Examines stories told by the members of a Roman Catholic parish staff to each other in informal settings, investigating ways they reinforced or challenged the organization's power structure and reflected changes in cultural traditions. Shows that much story content reinforced the church's hierarchy, and occasionally reflected changes in the larger…