Offers a commentary on the studies of Kyratzis and Guo, Goodwin, Nakamura and Cook-Gumperz and Szymanski comprising the special issue of this journal. The special issue is situated in the history of gender studies in developmental pragmatics. The inadequately recognized role of cultural factors is highlighted. (Author/VWL)

After describing scenes that reveal a pattern in which whites regard blacks' speech behavior as threatening, aggressive, or hostile, and in which blacks disagree with their interpretation, this paper explores differences between black and white cultural assumptions, values, and conventions of aggressive behavior to account for the different…

Educational cognitive style refers to a person's preferred ways of gathering meaning from surroundings. It involves four groups of behaviors: receiving, expressing, reasoning, and handling the receiving/expressing in specific settings or modalities. A comparison of communication and educational cognitive style shows that several ideas are common…

The many ways in which children use language are examined in this paper, and classroom implications are outlined. The first part of the paper discusses such topics as young children's focus on meaning in language, teachers' tendency to examine language in terms of form rather than meaning, and the importance of the student/teacher interaction…