Teaching Spanish has become increasingly popular in the United States due to demographic shifts. This study focuses on a Spanish-only initiative for an existing Foreign Language in the Elementary School (FLES) program proposed by a southeastern public school district's school board. It analyzes discourses underlying the policymakers' rationales…

It has been claimed that homework is an effective means of developing good study habits (Cooper, 1994) and fostering positive attitudes (Marzano & Pickering, 2007) and self-responsibility (Brown, in Plato, 2000). If we are to believe this, then we need to ensure that all learners have equal or at least similar opportunities to gain these…

Conversational technologies such as email, chat rooms, and blogs have made the transition from novel communication technologies to powerful tools for learning. Currently virtual worlds are undergoing the same transition. We argue that the next wave of innovation is at the level of the computer interface, and that mixed-reality environments offer…

There is virtue in the movement recently begun within academic discourse that moves personal expression into professional writing. But before academics can understand why it works, they must first acknowledge that at times it does not work. A case in point would be Jane Tompkins' essay, "Me and My Shadow," which is predicated on a…

This unannotated bibliography features 99 listings of books and articles on, among other topics, language, linguistics, conversation, and gender, all written by the influential sociolinguist, Deborah Tannen. It also offers 10 listings of works co-authored or co-edited by Tannen. Although the bibliography focuses on written works published in…

This paper posits that students who are in intercultural communication classes on a university level benefit from models of experiential learning. Assuming the pedagogical theory that communication study that is passive, noninteractive learning is less successful and less satisfying than proactive, interactive learning, the paper discusses the…

When beginning composition students are initiated into the discourse community of the academy, they often attempt to mimic academic discourse via a particular style of writing marked by fragmentation, incoherence, odd or inappropriate diction, the juxtaposition of colloquialisms with sophisticated academic structures, and an unintentionally…

This study reports on preliminary findings of two research projects conducted during the 1988-89 and 1990-91 in Cordoba, Argentina, that examined fixed, idiomatic, Spanish-language expressions that are very common, but often ignored, in oral Spanish discourse. Study 1 subjects were 13 university-educated, adults, born in the city; study 2 subjects…

This paper explores a form of classroom discourse, organized around student argumentation, that brings into focus an alternative view of science and science education as socially and culturally constituted, meaning-making activities. To elaborate the differences between this emerging discourse practice and conventional practice, two examples are…

Part of an account of a community experiment in Pittsburgh trying to address the contested issue of landlords and tenants through explicitly rhetorical strategies for planning and deliberation, a study focused on conflict and how community collaboration handled difference. Four subjects, landlords and/or tenants who represented a range of…

A number of texts concerning the possibility of a nuclear war and more particularly, its aftermath, have been published for adults and senior school children. This paper discusses literary theory with a focus on two texts currently used with 14-year olds: "Z for Zachariah" by Robert C. O'Brien and "Brother in the Land" by…

A variety of techniques for collecting and analyzing information about the natural use of natural languages is surveyed, emphasizing the importance of recognizing the properties of a research task that make a given technique more or less suitable to it rather than comparing techniques globally and ranking them absolutely. An initial goal is to…

This book unites speech act theory and conversation analysis to advance a theory of conversational competence, called the Dynamic Speech Act Theory (DSAT). In contrast to traditional speech act theory that focuses almost exclusively on intuitive assessments of isolated, constructed examples, this theory is predicated on the assumption that speech…

A discussion of approaches to comparative rhetoric looks at diverse approaches and proposes that analysis can be enriched by incorporating the perspective of ethnography of communication. Contributions to the field of comparative rhetoric from second language learning and teaching mainstream rhetoric, and text linguistics are discussed, focusing…

The issue of agency bedevils contemporary composition theorists and practitioners. In theory, scholars such as Lester Faigley, James Berlin, and Patricia Bizzell have critiqued the foundation priority of thought to language, yet their emphasis on language has cast disturbing doubts on the origins of an individual's thoughts. In practice, the…