The relationship between ethnicity and patterns of student classroom participation was investigated in two university English as second language classrooms. Data were collected through videotaping, audiotaping, and observation of three 50-minute teacher-directed class discussions centering on language exercises. The students were categorized as…

A family's metaphor, the frame of reference or perspective that is created and reflected through a family's use of figurative language, is a key to understanding the underlying values and realities of families. Constructivist theories of language view metaphor as essential to the creation of meaning. From this perspective, using metaphor as a…

A case study in second language learning was conducted by the researcher on herself in a specific sociolinguistic context, Trinidad, and with reference to a specific first and second language relationship, standard English and Trinidadian English Creole. The study attempted to: (1) demonstrate the complexity of social, cultural, psychological, and…

Although many metaphors were developed throughout the Free Speech Movement at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, the central metaphor of the movement was the university as a factory. The analogy was used to argue that trends in higher education were moving toward the dehumanization of students and was related to the national…

Summaries of the Danish internal reports of the essay studies, the introspection studies, and the literary analyses that are part of the larger interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project concerning the collective versus the individual nature of the response to literature are presented in this report. Various sections of the five papers…

Six papers resulting from the fieldwork projects of members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics program at the University of North Dakota include: "A Relational Grammar Approach to Kera Syntax" (Janet K. Camburn), a syntactic study of an Afroasiatic language; "Clitic Doubling and M-Chains in Piraha" (Dan Everett), examining…

Sociolinguists have recently demonstrated the value of directives in indicating the relationship between status and linguistic form. The purpose of the instrument developed for this study was to quantify the coerciveness of directives on the basis of the theoretical approaches in the literature to objectify the comparison of directive forms.…

The primary goal of early reading instruction, according to this paper, should be to teach children to comprehend written discourse in a manner similar to that for oral discourse because both types of discourse require decoding ability--graphic or acoustic. The paper asserts that to simply design reading instruction to achieve the subgoal of…

The 10 articles in this book examine how comprehension is affected by what the reader brings to the text, the manner in which the text is structured by the author, and the contextual variables that shape the meaning derived by the reader. Specific topics covered in the articles are (1) background knowledge and comprehension, (2) learning how to…

This annotated bibliography focuses on the fields of cognitive anthropology and sociolinguistics. Topics covered include: (1) classroom ethnographies; (2) conversational and discourse analysis; (3) ecological and sociological approaches to the study of education and schooling; (4) ethnomethodology; (5) communication and speech act theory; (6)…

A study investigated the process of information extraction in reading in order to determine whether language constraints in texts reduced the amount of visual detail noticed by the reader during the reading of specific words. A detailed examination was made of 20 college students' eye movement patterns as they read a group of selected passages.…

This paper describes Directed Activities Related to Text (DART), procedures that were developed and are used in the Reading for Learning Project at the University of Nottingham (England) to enhance learning from texts and that fall into two broad categories: (1) text analysis procedures, which require students to engage in some form of analysis of…

This collection of research on curriculum and program development in languages for special purposes (LSP) contains the following papers: (1) "LSP Curriculum Development--From Policy to Practice," by Ronald Mackay and Maryse Bosquet; (2) "The Problem of Needs Assessment in English for Specific Purposes: Some Theoretical and Practical…

A "gambit" is any of the hundreds of brief, idiomatic rejoinders, rhetorical phrases, or comments that are essential to fluent conversation. This textbook fosters familiarity with such phrases in English by encouraging their use in the carrying out of a series of provocative class exercises, including a handwriting analysis and a "love test."…

Recent studies on written communication have emphasized the importance of discourse organization and rhetoric for the learning of reading and writing in a foreign language. This paper describes an attempt at a contrastive study of specialized discourse in French and in English. A corpus of medical articles all on the same subject has been analysed…