The study examines the development of the registers of academic writing by African American college-level students through style and grammar: indirection inherent in the oral culture of the African American community and the paratactic functions of "because." Discourse analysis of 74 samples of academic writing by 20 African American undergraduate…

"Is academic speech "more like" casual conversation or academic writing?" [Swales, J. (2001). "Metatalk in American academic talk. The cases of 'point' and 'thing'." "Journal of English Language," 29(1), p. 37]. Taking a corpus-based perspective to the analysis, this study compares the language of university classroom talk to academic prose and…

In multilingual Europe, visual discourse may function as a cross-culturally strategic form of communication, thanks in part to its perceptual and iconic availability. In this regard, we offer a social semiotic critique of a range of visual resources deployed in the official promotional texts of 30 of the 43 cities either nominated or competing for…

This study presents a taxonomy of the recasts that arose in communicative ESL and EFL classrooms. The taxonomy is used to examine the relationship between different characteristics of recasts and learner uptake/repair. Characteristics that were significantly related to uptake were the length of recasts (short vs. long), the linguistic focus…

This article takes as its focus the "and" in discourses of teaching and learning. Drawing upon the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I argue that the "and" signifies a complex, sticky relationship between teaching and learning, and that we can radicalise our conception of "and" to bring forward a range of different discourses. The argument suggests…

Using ethnographic interviews this study reveals that a great deal of discontent and criticism surfaces when Moroccans who live in Belgium and the Netherlands speak about the education their children receive in these countries. They often see Western schools and society as immoral and racist while they portray themselves as first-class educators.…

Employing conversation analysis as a research technique, this study investigates the ways that unintelligibility is accounted for and overcome within a therapeutic encounter between an individual with aphasia and dysarthria and his clinician. The results emphasize the collaborative nature of intelligibility negotiation and demonstrate how both the…

This study examined the effects of conversational language (e.g., asking questions, inviting replies, acknowledgments, referencing others by name, closing signatures, "I agree, but", greetings, etc.) on the frequency and types of responses posted in reply to given types of messages (e.g., argument, evidence, critique, explanation), and…

A bilingual elementary school teacher and mother of a bilingual child, the author questions the presence of specific bilingualism discourses in two Southeastern public schools. Despite research that shows the acquisition and development of two languages actually augment language processing and problem solving skills, the perception of children's…

This guide to ERRATA, a set of HyperCard-based tools for response analysis and error diagnosis in language testing, is intended as a user manual and general reference and designed to be used with the software (not included here). It has three parts. The first is a brief survey of computational techniques available for dealing with student test…

The study examines one component of the system of complementation in Palestinian Arabic. It is argued that the complementizer in question has an inherent semantics capable of influencing the meaning of sentences in which it is embedded. Specifically, its presence in a complex sentence communicates modal meanings distinct from those communicated by…

A study examined internal structure of the Discourse Completion Test (DCT), a technique used to elicit data in sociolinguistic research, and effects of systematic modification to its situational prompt on subject response. The DCT is a questionnaire containing situations, briefly described, designed to elicit a particular speech act. Subjects read…

This study examined the quality of verbal exchanges between teachers and children in 4 primary classrooms and the 4-year-old groups in 4 child care centers in Australia. Data were collected during small group activities for a minimum of 4 hours. Interactions were audiotaped, transcribed, and divided into messages which are equivalent to clauses…

Drawing data from audiotaped lessons with 10 native-speaker English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) teachers and 12 EFL learners of varied linguistic backgrounds, a study explored some of the ways in which classroom talk by learners is collaboratively built to repair errors, misunderstandings, and non-communication. Focus is on both explicit and…

Papers on semantic theory and research include: "Presupposition, Congruence, and Adverbs of Quantification" (Mike Calcagno); "A Unified Account of '(Ta)myen'-Conditionals in Korean" (Chan Chung); "Spanish 'imperfecto' and 'preterito': Truth Conditions and Aktionsart Effects in a Situation Semantics" (Alicia Cipria,…