Contends that critical audience research has resisted "scientific" discourses that appear positivist. States that recent research begins to show the same errors as earlier positivist style--re-emergence of debates on political economy and cultural imperialism are aimed at overturning what are seen as orthodoxies of opposition and…

This paper comments on the topic of literacy and politics by answering a question: "Why can't literacy educators seem to reach the politicians?" The discussion in the paper shows how educators and politicians communicate in different languages; when speaking about education educators tend to use their own jargon, while policymakers tend…

Samuel Yette's "The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America" belongs to an honorable tradition of African American writing, a tradition which draws attention to a necessary distinction between the promise of freedom and democracy and what people actually experience in their everyday lives in the United States. Yette's language…

Traces scholarly constructions of basic writers' identities. Asks what those students who are labeled basic writers are accomplishing in their speech and writing. Offers a speculative model for analyzing basic writing student discourse. Uses that model to examine the language used in a basic writing classroom. Reviews the implications of such work…

Pondering the purposes of family stories and transcribed dialogues between family members raises an insight or two concerning the attainment of literacy. For instance, an exchange between two elder members of a family, one a former school teacher, the other a Ph.D., illustrates the spirited nature of arguments in the family. The school teacher…

A study focused attention on the academic personas acquired by two AAVE-oriented (African American Vernacular English) beginning writers as reflected by their speech in informal settings and the style they employed in academic tasks. The study explores the degree to which literacy experiences (home and school) affect students' lives. It was guided…

This paper states that college radio invokes two ends of a language spectrum -- the clean language authorized for on-air use and the dirty language prohibited from such use, and that the interaction between the two produces "expositional obscenity," a catalytic form of discourse that invites the audience to render a judgment about…

In this paper, I take the position that the recently increased "e-talk" permeating our language potentially compromises our field's professionalism by "one-minutizing" learning that uses computer-mediated technologies. In so doing, I discuss historical aspects of adult education, the importance of language as a naming function, the evolution of…