Focuses on the kind of assessment that takes place within a classroom context, and therefore looks at assessing, grading, or testing writing, since when educators talk about classroom assessment they talk of grades and tests, at times using all three terms interchangeably. Hopes to draw educators into new conversations about assessment and the…

Advances practices for designing, analyzing, and reporting communication research. Focuses on improving researchers' abilities to cumulate results across studies and improving the utility of the individual study. Concludes by summarizing the set of propositions advocated. (SG)

Analysis of 11 further education staff development officers' conceptions of learners, learning, and teaching practice suggests a gap between a professed focus on learners and an actual emphasis on performance management and continuous improvement. Emphasis on individualizing learners and learning marginalizes the social context of teaching and…

Focuses on the relevance of principles of information organization in adult second language acquisition. Looks at typological features of information structure that allow speakers to organize and shape the flow of information when carrying out complex tasks and pinpoints factors that lead to the selection of linguistic form. The nature of the…

A study of child protection agencies in New South Wales shows how reforms involving a neoliberal interpretation of the learning organization, rather than encouraging teamwork and employee participation, are used to govern and control. Such new "technologies of training" demand changes in the character and identity of workers. (SK)

Drew on extensive archives from 10 graduate employee unions' Web sites to examine their publicly presented identities (marginalized workers and future professionals), ideologies (traditional and professional unionism with little focus on social justice), and strategies (disruptive protest and professional politics locally). (EV)

Discussion of automatic abstracting of technical papers focuses on a knowledge-based method that uses two sets of rules. Topics discussed include anaphora; text structure and discourse; abstracting techniques, including the keyword method and the indicator phrase method; and tools for text skimming. (27 references) (LRW)

A critical examination of the findings of Valentine (1985; 1986), studies devoted to cross-sex communication in Hindi and Indian English, is shown to reveal that the assumptions of the models on which such descriptions are based are not only nonexplanatory but also untenable. (20 references) (GLR)

Attempts to give a clearer picture of discourse analysis and the assumptions behind it, focusing on its use in the domain of schizophrenic speech, to provide a better indication of both the promise and the procedures of a discourse-analytic approach to the speech productions of psychiatric populations. (Author/CB)

Discusses how schema theory and discourse analysis together form an especially strong theoretical framework for the use of video in the second-language classroom. (Author/OD)

Sociolinguistic analysis of the speech patterns in Spenser's "The Faerie Queen, Book VI" indicated that the socially different characters' language styles did not vary much among themselves or from the narrative, suggesting that the strict verse scheme requirements and a concern for unity of literary style leveled out speech particularities. (CB)

Examines imperatives regarding their different construction forms as well as the syntactic and pragmatic features of the imperative stem that influence the form and meaning of the tag attached to it. The conclusion is drawn that the imperative tag cannot be best analyzed as merely a frozen expression. (GLR)

Argues that Jeremy Rifkin's "Algeny" is epideictic rhetoric, related to the European "Jeremiad," a traditional lamentation mode. Notes that Rifkin draws a parallel between genetic engineering and alchemy and adopts a world view dominated by a static hierarchy. Suggests that the teaching of the epideictic genre underscore both…

Asserts that passive constructions are not the mark of flawed writing as many textbooks claim them to be but are instead frequent and effective stylistic variants. (RAE)

Traces developments in conversational analysis (CA) through the 1970s and 1980s, and discusses how second-language acquisition research has used CA in both its own development and that of second-language teaching. (119 references) (GLR)