A study investigated the extent to which native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) of Portuguese understand implicatures in Brazilian television commercials in Portuguese. Subjects were nine Brazilian graduate students and 11 American students of Portuguese at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. Correct inference of the…

This paper presents an approach to analyzing classroom talk that sheds light on the intellectual work of the classroom. The analysis system extends the theoretical construct of preference organization from conversational analysis to the study of a whole-class, teaching-learning interaction in a ninth-grade English classroom, during which an expert…

One of a series examining the instructional effectiveness of a videodisc-based case methodology, this study analyzed communication patterns among preservice teachers during implementation of a videodisc-based case methodology for preservice remedial reading instruction. Subjects, 12 students in an undergraduate remedial reading and practicum…

The thesis of this paper is that constructivism and similar pedagogic formulations are problematic because: (1) being nondialectical they close off possibilities for dialogue about issues such as those discussed in this paper; and (2) they are embedded in forms of discourse which privilege middle-class culture, values, language, and ways of…

A discussion of the translation of fiction focuses on metaphors in the speech of characters. Illustrations are drawn from an Afrikaans novel, "Fiela se kind" ("Fiela's Child"), translated into English by its author, Dalene Matthee. It is argued that if the interdependence of the intratextual components of narrative texts is not…

The distinctive features of narratives told by Asians, particularly Japanese, who are non-native speakers of English and residing in the United States are analyzed. Focus is on the narrative structure produced and the communication problems occurring due to cultural traits, particularly as they differ from North American norms. Educational and…

This book is designed to provide practical advice to parents and educators on the language acquisition process. Citing numerous case studies and anecdotal examples, it explains how children learn to talk and acquire language. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to language acquisition, explaining the components, forms, and structure of language.…

This paper describes a coding system devised to analyze conversations of graduate students in applied linguistics at Edinburgh University. The system was devised to test the hypothesis that as shared knowledge among conversation participants grows, the textual density of in-group members has more cues than that of strangers. The informal…

A set of recorded teacher-child interactions in a successful kindergarten classroom was analyzed using the Mehan interactional model for analyzing the sequential organization of speech acts within classroom lessons. The study identified aspects of teacher-student interaction during formal instruction time at micro-interactional levels. The class…

The orthodox view of reading as the accumulation of isolated skills continues to dominate classroom practice. Under this framework, prescriptions for problem readers usually involve intensified drills in the same basic skills to which the students failed to respond in the first place. Prevention entails the early and often precipitous examination…

This comparative study evaluated the writing growth of 97 college freshman before and after instruction to determine if a process-centered mode of teaching had a more significant impact than a traditional form-centered mode of instruction on discourse coherence in composition. The study used a pretest/posttest, quasi-experimental design with both…

Focusing on recent composition theory, this paper offers suggestions for writing teachers in applying concepts of dialogic discourse directly to the pedagogy of the college writing course. The first section of the paper addresses the influence of the social constructionist work on interpretation theory by Richard Rorty, Clifford Geertz, and…

It has been noted that students have an influential role in determining the nature of classroom events in the middle grades and that their teachers adjust their classroom behavior in response to the characteristics of students in the class. This paper analyzes instruction as discourse between teacher and students and the collaborative nature of…

This study investigated young children's development of understanding of two written genre registers, story and information books, by analyzing 5-year-olds' repeated pretend readings of a typical text of each genre. Ten female and 10 male kindergarten students were read 3 books in each genre during their kindergarten year. At each child's reading…

This study investigated how Finnish-Swedish bilingual 10-year-olds (n=26) produce self-repairs in a narrative discourse, in comparison with monolingual agemates (n=10), in three respects: (1) types of repair; (2) number of repairs; and (3) the structural organization of repair. Altogether, 36 Finnish and 36 Swedish narratives were examined. The…