This literature review explores competing views of the relationship between adult literacy and U.S. economic difficulties. Trends in public policy, legislation, labor forecasting, and workplace training from the 1960s to the present are reviewed. Consequences of the perceived gap between workers' skills and national economic needs are discussed.…

Reports an analysis of a 10-hour collection of conversations in a New Zealand factory office. Computer software was used to determine the content and vocabulary of the conversations. Discusses possible applications of the study for teachers of pre-employment English for specific purposes courses. (Author/VWL)

Analyzes written discourse that explores the actual structuring of text via some consistent framework. Highlights efforts to find the structures and linguistic patterns in texts that contribute to how they are understood, interpreted, and used. (Author/VWL)

Examines the ways in which literacy functions in institutional encounters and focuses on the ways literacy interacts with power and authority. Examines the enactment of literacy in medical encounters. Finds that institutional encounters enacting the discourse system of American medicine reproduce power and dominance in fairly predictable ways. (TB)

Analysis of semistructured interviews with 10 parents concerning their views on physical punishment found parental confusion and contradiction. Four categories of justification for physical punishment were identified: pedagogic (educational), cathartic (need relief), individualistic (power assertion), and cyclical (reproduction). The utility of…

Examines "question-response" sequences in Japanese political discourse, with particular reference to how questions are used to control other interlocutors as well as the relationship between questions and conflict. Findings reveal that the tendency to avoid overt control and conflict is reflected in questioning strategies employed in…

Examines how "-guo," a perfective aspect marker in Chinese, is used to narrate a sequence of events in speech. The study's analysis of transcribed audio-recorded natural conversation shows "-guo" indicates that a situation is viewed as a bounded whole with an emphasis on the situation's end-boundary, and that the confusion in…

Investigates the contraction of negatives in a corpus of discourse and writing in order to permit comparison of the relative influences of various linguistic and social parameters on contraction. Argues that pragmatic and morphological interpretation of negatives entails that negative contraction and auxiliary contraction should be distinguished…

Investigates whether primary school girls took up powerful positions in role-play groups and how these children were positioned through gender discourses during their interaction. Analysis suggests that children's constructions of gender appear potentially to empower boys and disempower girls in interaction. It suggests that discourse analysis can…

A study evaluated and compared four methods of assessing reliability on one discourse analysis procedure--a modified version of Damico's Clinical Discourse Analysis. The methods were Pearson product-moment correlations; interobserver agreement; Cohen's kappa; and generalizability coefficients. The strengths and weaknesses of the methods are…

Describes experiences and several strategies for developing discourse in the classroom through problem solving and context. (KHR)

Looks at systematicity from the perspective of two putative discourse universals related to topic continuity that have been addressed separately in past studies of article acquisition. Examines how these discourse universals account for patterns of article use and nonuse in narratives written by Finnish- and Swedish-speaking learners of English.…

Reports an experimental study of the differential effects of premodified input, internationally modified input, and modified output on the comprehension of directions in a listen-and-do task and the acquisition of new words embedded in the directions. (Author/VWL)

This study on code-mixing focuses on the influence of Spanish in Nahuatl discourse as revealed in narratives produced by adults and children. Results indicate differences in frequency of content word embedded language (Spanish), lexical items across grade level (for children), grade level attained (for adults), and correlations (for children)…

Uses two discussion questions to teach Camus'"The Guest." Reminds students that in their discussions they need to pay close attention to the text. Explains to the students that the point of view Camus is using points to the fact that he wants the reader to focus on the character, Daru, and perhaps identify with him. (SG)