Explores how students are influenced by media technology, specifically television and computers. Notes that media are not just a vehicle of information, but are primarily models of how to see, think, read, write, and reason. (MM)

Examination of a profoundly deaf child's fingerspelling in more than 100 hours of interaction videotaped at intervals over six years revealed a gradual acquisition of the rules for fingerspelling and knowledge of the relation of fingerspelling to signs and to printed and spoken words. (Author/CB)

The distinction made historically between discourse and conversation is traced to the distinction made between written and oral language. The role of this distinction in the development of second language teaching theory and practice is discussed. 76 references. (MSE)

Comparison of the performance of 25 deaf Italian adolescents and hearing controls on written grammatical tests found that the deaf subjects showed normal development in pluralization tasks, delayed development in pronoun tasks, and a qualitatively different pattern in an article task. (Author/CB)

This article examines performance in written English and Chinese in a sample of Singapore students (n=43). The implications of the findings for the Singapore classroom are discussed. (Contains 24 references.) (JL)

French Creoles are spoken in many different parts of the world, including the Indian Ocean, United States, Caribbean, and South America. These Kweyol speech communities are described, in the Kweyol Project, which examines Kweyol language issues and the establishment of a Kweyol Literacy Scheme. (Contains 15 references.) (LB)

This article describes research carried out with 389 Italian senior high school students to test the hypothesis that there is a relationship between one's written language and cognitive style. This study takes previous research in the area of field dependence and field independence in a new direction. (CFM)

Presents three ways of understanding literacy and literacy studies: literacy as the technology of cognitive change, literacy as basic skills performance, and literacy as communicative competence. Maintains that each of these understandings suggests something very important about how society, or at least how academic society, construes the value…

Essay questions, interviews, and personality inventories of 35 male and female college students revealed that the avoidance of sexist language was linked to less traditional sex role views and a lesser adherence to fundamentalist Christian beliefs. (DM)

Proposes that writers must form accurate representations of how their readers will interpret their texts to convey their ideas successfully. Two experiments demonstrated that writers who received feedback from their readers were better able to form representations in subsequent works than were writers who did not receive feedback. (18 References)…

Analyzes the relationships between complimenting strategies associated with male and female language use and evaluations of the effectiveness of written discourse. Finds that use of certain complimenting strategies associated with male and female language use correlate with lower ratings of ideational effectiveness. Illustrates ways that gender is…

Proposes the Vocabulary-Management Profile, a tool for discourse analysis. The number of new words introduced in a moving interval of text 35 words long is counted and a curve created by plotting the number of new words in a successive interval at the midpoint of the interval. Analyses of text by George Orwell and James Joyce are presented. (JL)

Compares the style, emphasis, and tone in textbook chapters on trauma care written for and by doctors and nurses. Discusses ways physicians' and nurses' roles are mirrored in the writing. Notes that doctors' prose is focused, with attention given to injuries and their repair; whereas nurses' prose adopts a holistic view, caring for patients'…

Addresses problems that arise when literacy education is brought from national and international centers to people whose identity is with local languages and literacies. Local literacies are defined with respect to different languages and writing systems, invented local literacies, and vernacular literacies. (Contains 33 references.) (Author)

Finds no significant effects of an instructional intervention on students' persuasive writing at two grade levels (third and fifth). Determines the categories and types of written persuasion used by students at four grade levels (third, fifth, 10th, and 12th). (SR)