Human and social capital discourses attempt to explain New Zealand's brain drain. Solutions related to each discourse involve offering incentives for returning or creating links so that expatriates can contribute to their homeland from abroad. Establishing such "diaspora networks" might be the role of adult education. (Contains 43…

Focuses on the dynamics of interracial electronic communication. Examines the misunderstandings that arose in this interracial discussion, situating the causes and consequences of the students' discourse within both the local context of the electronic forum and within wider cultural patterns. Suggests strategies for facilitating more productive…

Offers a method of selecting, analyzing, discussing, and testing from college reading materials that has worked significantly better than previous traditional approaches. Concludes that by employing greater student responsibility for what they read, students' interest, enthusiasm, and scholarly use of read material seems to have risen. (SG)

Investigated the use of complex syntax in narrative language samples of older children and adolescents with Down syndrome and a group of typically developing children matched on mean length of utterance. Findings indicate that syntactic development in individuals with Down Syndrome continues into late adolescence and is not limited to simple…

Analysis of a recent scientific event, and some of its linguistic and conceptual frames from both a lay and specialist perspective, shows that English for Science and Technology analyses could benefit from adopting a scientific method of investigation, some background knowledge of science, and reconsideration of ideas found in linguistics on the…

Draws a distinction between two kinds of summarization involved in discourse comprehension: abbreviated versions and brief accounts. English summaries written by Austrian university students are used to illustrate the different degrees of contextualization, or schematic priming, that influenced the amount of processing the students performed on…

Describes the seven main components of QUEST, a cognitive model of question answering that attempts to simulate the answers adults produce when they answer different types of questions, both closed class and open class. Illustrates how the model could be applied to different types of knowledge structures, including causal networks, goal…

Tests the QUEST model of question answering in two experiments. Examines which components of QUEST could predict good answers to why-questions and how-questions in the context of short stories. Supports the validity of arc-search procedures and structural distance for both question categories. Finds only partial support for number of information…

Tests the QUEST model of question answering in naturalistic settings and in settings with complex pragmatic constraints: telephone surveys, business interactions, filmed interviews, and interviews on popular television programs. Finds that QUEST explains most of the answers in these contexts and virtually all of the answers that refer to the…

Analyzes why conceptual ambiguity surrounds the subject of writing plans: why they are viewed alternatively favorably and unfavorably; why they are sometimes mental and sometimes written constructs; and why they are sometimes indistinguishable from writing goals. Concludes that one problem is the view of writing as product. (SG)

Uses a pragma-dialectical analysis to argue that the legal process is rational. Suggests that the legal system's own rules guarantee that the conditions of rational and efficient discussion are present. Describes the Netherlands' civil procedure rules and shows how such rules help ensure that legal discussions are rational. (SG)

Reports on a study in which subjects heard the beginnings of spoken words, followed by increasingly larger segments of word-onset information until the words could be correctly identified. Results are discussed in terms of word-initial phonology as a trigger for response activation. (34 references) (Author/OD)

Examines Susan Sontag's February 1982 Town Hall Address as a case study of strategies and constraints associated with contextual reconstruction (whereby rhetors address perceived conflicts between text and context). Traces the development of these concepts in Sontag's writings. Discusses the counter-intentional understanding of Sontag's speech by…

Analyzes processes by which gay people see themselves in relation to the social construction of AIDS discourse, both as individuals and as a collective. Uses Foucault's concepts of "subjectification" and "bio-power" to describe self-defining constructs of people with AIDS and to explicate their interactions with the political…

Uses Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia (the dialectal voices present in language) to describe the narrative discourse in Flannery O'Connor's novel "Wise Blood," and to explore the rhetorical effects of the novel and the values embodied in its language. (SR)