To suggest that activity in the classroom shift from a focus on memorizing procedures to using mathematical reasoning is to suggest a shift in the classroom environment accompanied by shifts in teacher talk. The task of this report was to introduce the idea of teachers' orienting behaviors aimed at facilitating student cognition, and to suggest…

A study analyzed the multiple purposes of songs in which children in early childhood classrooms sing and move their bodies to the lyrics, the discourses the songs mobilize, and the gendered positions the songs accomplish. Subjects, 28 students entering their first year in a suburban primary school in a large regional center in southern Victoria,…

Issues related to changing modes of business communication, particularly those that are computer-mediated, are discussed as they relate to the teaching of business English. Information about current practices in computer-mediated communication (CMC) drawn from the business press and research journals is summarized, focusing on that which can help…

Experiences with the data, analysis, and results in the Finnish Contrastive Discourse Analysis Project (1985-1988) at the University of Oulu are reported. The purpose of the project was to describe the conversational skills of advanced Finnish speakers of English, and especially to determine the level of their social competence or their ability to…

The process of setting objectives for the reading component of an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course at Suva University in Fiji is described. The course is taken concurrently with a history course whose reading component is integrated into the EAP curriculum and whose specified objectives were to be facilitated by the EAP instruction. The…

A study investigated the effect of discourse style adopted by students on the way in which the assignment was graded. Subjects were three foreign college students, all non-native speakers of English, in an introductory business course. The assignment was a case study of organizational behavior in two competing companies; the students were to…

A study examined a resistant student's interactive discursive practices within a participant framework. Data were taken from observations, audiotapes, and transcripts of teacher-led small group discussions in two sixth-grade classrooms at a public urban middle school. Seven visiting teachers from a university and 56 students in the two classes…

A study investigated patterns in the apparent syntactic errors of native English-speaking, upper-level learners of Arabic as a foreign language. One hundred writing samples, including summaries, criticisms, and free composition, were gathered from a number of university courses. Error types analyzed included articles, subordinate clauses, two-word…

Advanced learners of second languages and natural language processing systems both demand much more detailed lexical information than conventional dictionaries provide. Text composition, whether by humans or machines, requires a thorough understanding of relationships between words, such as selectional restrictions, case patterns, factives, and…

Given that the task of freshman composition is to initiate students into the multidisciplinary academic discourse community, English teachers can speed up the novice's introduction more effectively than can specialists in those disciplines by having students observe, analyze, and produce the salient features of a discourse community's…

The casual conversation of six pairs of Japanese and six pairs of American colleges students was analyzed for evidence of two related aspects of conversation management: the linguistic characteristics of utterance units and back-channel strategies. Utterance units are defined as those occurring between identifiable pauses or breaks in tempo.…

A sample from a teacher-developed instructional television program is used to illustrate some possibilities for the exploitation of videotaped instructional materials in second language teaching. Aspects of the planning of tape production are outlined, and a transcript of the segment is provided. Features of the discourse from linguistic and…

The need for an analytical approach to the study of phatic, metalingual, and metacommunicative functions in asymmetrical communicative situations (between native speakers and language learners) is discussed. The study presents theoretical frameworks for gambits and repairs, the linguistic phenomena that primarily serve those functions, and…

Generally, classroom discourse in foreign language teaching and learning is formalized and does not contain impromptu speech. However, analysis of classroom discourse in a German university foreign language course revealed that teachers' evaluative acts (followups) and "glides" linking one teacher-learner exchange to another do contain…

Focusing on purpose in the writing of college freshmen, a study examined the writing processes and how they related to the conceptions of purpose of four freshmen enrolled in a composition course at Indiana University. Discourse-based interviews were conducted before and after the students completed three tasks designed to vary their choice of…