By viewing women's literacy within the context of America from the Colonial period until the present, it is clear that men have traditionally shaped and controlled who shall be literate and what shall be viewed as literate, both within and outside the educational system. Women's writing from the Colonial period is virtually non-existent, and…

Seeking to understand American and Nicaraguan perspectives of the Nicaraguan revolution, a study examined the rhetorical strategies used by Presidents Reagan and Ortega in their speeches. Ten public addresses made by each president in 1985-1986, pertaining to funding for Nicaraguan counterrevolutionary forces, were charted and examined for…

The discourse about information technology is often overlooked by researchers and scholars as a means of understanding the recent process of computerization in education. The research explores this phenomenon through a comparative discourse analysis of primary and secondary school teachers and promoters of ICT integration. The results show that…

Children in school cooperate in the evaluation of their products and activities by teachers and other students by calling attention to these products and activities with various language strategies. The requests that someone notice something and/or praise it are the data base for this study. The unmarked speech act for this request type is in the…

The concept of communicative competence, which has recently become so influential in language teaching, has resulted in a new emphasis on the nature of interaction. Questions concerning the communicative needs of language learners are raised with regard to the types of interaction they will participate in, the roles they will have, and the…

This issue contains two articles in Spanish and three in English on the following topics: the practical presentation of English for Special Purposes (ESP) materials in science programs at the National University of Trujillo, "notional syllabus" and "discourse analysis" in relation to ESP materials, extra-linguistic principles in explaining…

This paper draws from a number of sources, from Muhammad Ali to TV commercials, to demonstrate the quite different conceptions that black and white Americans have of the meaning of boasting and bragging. For blacks, boasting and bragging are two distinct ways of speaking and communication. Boasting is a joking, playful verbal bahavior, not to be…

Under a contract with the Ministry of Education the working party prepared a general system for describing language teaching objectives to be used in higher education. The system is based on the specification of language use situations. By means of it the course objectives may be described in the form of communicative tasks, which the students are…

Comparison of free written compositions of 86 bilingual (Finnish-Swedish) and 86 monolingual (Swedish) third-, sixth-, and ninth-graders in a Finland Swedish comprehensive school revealed that bilinguals produced significantly more syntactic, vocabulary, and phraseology errors. Background variables correlating with errors included the student's…

Discusses the failure of Joe Bob Briggs' parody of "We Are the World" in terms of the development of the communal sense that creates a set of group norms, which in turn create "phantom constraints" of which the parody's author may not be aware.(NKA)

A study comparing the speech used by English-as-a-second-language teachers (N=4) when instructing beginning- and advanced-level adult classes found that display questions and self-repetitions were used much less often with advanced students, suggesting that students are being prepared, as they advance in classes, for real communicative…

Papers in these volumes were presented at a Mexican conference on linguistics. Most papers are in Spanish; the English translations of the titles include the following: "Directions in Contemporary Semantics" (L. Lara); "Regular Accentuation in Spanish" (C. Braithwaite); "Syntactic Order in Sonoran" (D. Brown); "Speech Datives or Interest/Not of…

This collection of articles on second language learning includes: "Action, langage et discours. Les fondements d'une psychologie du langage" ("Action, Language, and Discourse. Foundations of a Psychology of Language") (Jean-Paul Bronckart); "Contextes socio-culturels et appropriation des languages secondes: l'apprentissage en milieu social et la…

This study examines thought, language, and related action in sixth-graders working to understand concepts related to mass, volume, and density. Students from a heterogeneous urban classroom worked in various social contexts including individually, in pairs, in groups of four, and as a class. Their work was examined via videotapes, field notes,…

This paper identifies and discusses the connections between the way individuals frame their world based on the language they use and the impact of language and stereotyping on the perception that computer technology is primarily for certain individuals. The study explores how some of the dimensions of the language of computers and technology,…