Finds that joking in computer-mediated communication constitutes a hybrid form of discourse, mingling the conventions of print and speech. Notes that students use typography and space to better capture the rhythms and inflections of oral joking, but such joking instantly organizes participants into hierarchically differentiated groups, creating…

Lists and discusses the ways in which the author sees the "Initial Teacher Training National Curriculum for Primary English 1997" as unnecessary. Examines the document's language and finds many omissions as to what exactly is the "core curriculum." (PA)

The process of reproducing gender through discourses can inhibit role sharing and multiple roles for women. Two discourses influence the psyches of men and women to reproduce ideal types: women and men as equals and men as incompetent caregivers. (SK)

Challenges experimental studies of children's lexical acquisition by analyzing the process of introducing lexical items as a collaborative activity between adult and child. Examines conversational exchanges in which new words are introduced, and shows that there are many types of introductions of lexical items that go beyond the strategies of…

Presents how the identity of the foreign student is interactionally produced in the course of ordinary educational activities. Through a detailed discourse analysis within an ethnomethodological framework, shows instances of the social production of primary school students as "foreign" in and through the interaction with other students, the…

Analyzes two examples of classroom discourse between a teacher and a small group of students in English primary schools. Both transcripts are extracts from discussions that took place during guided reading sessions. Drawing on concepts from the work of the Bakhtin Circle, argues that one of the sequences exemplifies "pedagogical…

Focuses on discourses in the classroom. Presents three simple steps to ensure that students' voices are heard and valued. Suggests that educators educate themselves about the many existing Discourses (ways of behaving, speaking, reading and writing accepted by specific groups of people), value student contributions by using their Discourses as…

Presents evidence from English loans in Chichewa (Bantu), which shows that the recipient language is not a passive participant in the borrowing process: the borrowing language makes various modifications to the loan words to make them fit in the grammatical structure as well as cultural requirements of the recipient language. (Author/VWL)

Linguistic conventions used in early adult education journals limited the visibility of women leaders and exclusionary language intensified as professionalization increased. Early positive representations of women diminished as leadership discourse became "scientific" and women's exclusion mirrored that in the larger society. (SK)

Analyzes the events of July 23, 1993, when Carol Moseley-Braun was involved in two rhetorical events in the United States Senate dealing with racial issues and the rhetorical culture of the Senate. Concludes that the reactions are as telling as the actions, revealing a United States Senate fundamentally unprepared for such a subject and such a…

Describes and quantifies aspects of the comparative clauses conjoined with correlatives "than" and "as." The data are compared to show patterns of distribution, their spread across different genres, and the similarity or otherwise of their use in Britain and Australia. Findings show that the scalar comparative clause does not…

Examines the influence of interclause connectives on inference generation. Finds that readers incorporate causal knowledge-based inferences in the discourse representations for sentences containing a causal connective, and that connectives elicit inferences that are based on the connective's meaning. (SR)

Finds that judgments of communicative behaviors strongly predicted judgments of the communicator's traits and that both strongly predicted leadership evaluations; but measures of actual communication were poor predictors of trait judgments and leadership evaluations and were generally unrelated with judgments of these behaviors. Implies that…

Discusses T. S. Eliot's communicational scepticism, defined as "...the idea that meaning is to some extent private to each individual, since language is an inadequate instrument for conveying thoughts from one mind to another." The article examines various issues relating to the literary criticism of Eliot's poetry. (20 references) (CK)

Examines gender-related patterns of behavior in the second-language classroom and argues that these patterns dovetail with all the other dynamics of language behavior. The article concludes that drawing on the theoretical foundations of frames theory will ensure that research into gender-related patterns of classroom discourse will reflect the…