Investigates the nature of those portions of foreign language lessons in which teacher and students focus on the linguistic code rather than on content, that is meta talk. The focus is on scaffolded constructions and norms for meta talk. Examples and analyses are from lessons in Danish secondary schools. (SED)

Examined the usefulness of conversational themes and attention-focusing strategies in predicting how people comprehend and recall conversations. Found that (1) unambiguous themes predicted conversational comprehensibility and recall accuracy and (2) personal information may be processed differently from content information. (PD)

The vocative use of the Chinese term of address "tongzhi" ("comrade"), is analyzed. It was found that in its unmarked form it is a neutral term, but marked, its use becomes a negotiation to change the social distance between speaker and addressee, possibly explaining how certain such structures evolve and are maintained. (MSE)

Concludes that entering college freshmen do not use the top-level structure strategy in reading and recalling text. (FL)

Outlines some problems in university foreign language departments that arise from the fact that prestige in foreign language departments results mostly from publishing in the fields of literary criticism and linguistics, which have little to do with language teaching. Anticipates that the current interest in text linguistics and pragmatics will…

Describes the structure and emergence of extended argument sequences produced by preschool children. Provides a system for analyzing turns that initiate, elaborate, and terminate argument sequences. Draws conclusions regarding the development of proficiency in producing argument and interaction. (PD)

Applied Syntactic Language Computer Analysis and counts of legal jargon and power speech to analyze the language styles of plaintiffs, defendants, and attorneys in 20 civil trials. Concluded that successful trial participants speak differently than those who fail and that the differences in language style are significant and consistent. (PD)

Presents an experimental approach to the linguistic analysis of discourse organization. (FL)

This article reports on the first four colloquia at Neuchatel. Research in the areas of discourse analysis, the discovery of interpretive processes, and communicative competence should shape the evolution of second language teaching. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/CLK)

This report offers a brief summary of a master thesis that had the purpose to study the way conflict management educators write and think about "conflict." Using a critical discourse analysis (a la Foucault) of 22 conflict resolution manuals for adults and children (U.S., Canadian, Australian), and using a selected sample of those most available…

I have different approaches to this contribution. My concerns as a teacher and a teacher educator are to discuss how we manage to organise for inclusion of the variety of children's mathematics. How do we organise for the mathematics to be included into their mathematics? A message from children about what they expect mathematics to be has impact…

The purpose of this report is to examine issues associated with studying teaching of literature in reference to a study of high school students' responses to multicultural literature. The purpose of this study was to determine how students' discourses of race, class, and gender influences their responses to multicultural literature as well as how…

A teacher may assume he or she has power in the classroom and utilize what he or she considers to be thoughtful dramatic pauses to frame and enhance certain points during the lecture. A student, seated in the back row, may regard these pauses not as the rhetorical flourishes intended but as indicative of the teacher's hesitancy or confusion and…

Three papers in linguistics, all in French, are presented. "La delocutivite lexicale en francais standard: esquisse d'un modele derivationnel" ("Lexical Delocutivity in Standard French: Sketch of a Derivational Model"), by Marc Bonhomme, examines the process by which certain expressions become neologisms. "La terminologie…

Language, once a cultural asset in Europe, has become an economic commodity. The national language institutes now have the task of providing the means for making knowledge available in the national language and distributing locally produced information worldwide. This includes not only training more translators, but also developing the necessary…