Examines why learners of Mandarin use overt nouns and pronouns to a greater extent than native speakers. Findings indicate that no single syntactic structure is a significant contributor to the different rates of optional ellipsis but that some learners use ellipsis only in syntactic contexts permissible in English and most use it in a narrower…

Discusses the semistructured interview as a vehicle to understand the experience of taking an inservice education course in a foreign country through the eyes of the participants. This article demonstrates the details of the process based on two corpora of interviews with teachers of French as a Foreign Language studying in France, and with French…

Discusses conversations between tutor and student in British and Japanese culture, concentrating on face threatening acts such as criticisms, suggestions, and requests. The article distinguishes the attitudes of the "conciliator,""negotiator,""defender,""resigner," and "nonelaborator" and concludes…

Investigates whether children ages 1;6 just beginning to learn words can learn new words in a variety of nonostensive contexts. The results of two studies involving adults interacting with children in games of searching for objects suggest that from very early in language acquisition, children learn words through active attempts to understand…

Presents a case for teaching the discourse-based features of English intonation to improve cross-cultural communication at receptive and productive stages. A systematic approach is suggested for teaching the pragmatic and discourse functions of English intonation through a consciousness-raising methodology that utilizes authentic oral texts. (34…

Examines the evaluative component in bilingual discourse in order to show that for the purpose of evaluation, the bilingual often switches from one language to the other. The study examines spontaneous stories, unplanned short narratives and conversational exchanges occurring in the recorded speech of two Finnish-English bilingual children. (32…

Examines four factors in the operation of formal schemata in the recall of written narrative texts in English by students in Hong Kong: quantity of recall; temporal sequence of recall from story-schematic and input versions of stories; the effects of second language proficiency level on quantity of recall; and the quality of recall. (31…

In this study, planning time was manipulated as a variable in a trial administration of a semi-direct oral interaction test. Discourse analytic techniques were used to determine the nature and/or significance of difference in the elicited discourse across two conditions in terms of complexity and accuracy. Findings suggest that planning time may…

Explores one grammatical feature of metadiscourse--clauses with an anticipatory "it" and extraposed subject. This feature is compared in two computerized corpora, one consisting of published journal articles from the field business studies and the second of MBA student dissertations written by nonnative speakers of English. (Author/VWL)

Describes an action research project that took place in the Johannesburg College of Education in the period immediately before and after South Africa's first democratic election in 1994. Student teachers from diverse social and cultural backgrounds were introduced to critical language awareness theory and encouraged to read texts critically and…

Five papers discuss factors affecting human interactions with online information systems. Topics covered include the use of discourse analysis for interaction functions specification; the impact of optical data disks; the need for research into the search process; user access to data dictionaries; and the development of full text systems. (CLB)

Discusses the seed concepts constraint (SCC) principle, which suggests that the seed concepts in the intrasententially code-switched speech of the bilingual are marked in the phonetics of the first language in contradistinction to the second language. It is suggested that the SCC suffices to replace various particularistic grammatical claims…

A study of code switching attempts to validate the equivalence constraint on intrasentential code switching on the basis of natural speech data from two typologically different languages, Finnish and English. All informants are fluent native speakers of Finnish who emigrated to Canada as adults. (25 references) (Author/OD)

Advances a theory incorporating the most useful and transformative aspects of critical pedagogy. Border pedagogy acknowledges the shifting borders that undermine and reterritorialize power and knowledge, and links the educational enterprise with the struggle for a democratic society. Attempts to combine an emancipatory modernism with a…

Examines the variations of 17 grammatical variables (verb tenses, voice, and form) within the communicative function of 51 medical English scholarly papers. Three axes of variable distribution are revealed that help categorize the papers as case reports, editorials, or research papers. Pedagogical guidelines for preparation and use of reading…