The present paper examines negotiation of meaning and language-related episodes in Chinese-German eTandem interaction, focusing on Chinese as target language. Against the background of the interactionist approach to language learning and drawing upon Swain and Lapkin's (1998, Interaction and second language learning: Two adolescent French…

Existing studies on doctor-client interactions have largely focused on monolingual encounters and the interactional effects and functions of the languages used in the communication between doctors and their clients. They have neither, to a large extent, examined the several codes employed in single encounters and their pragmatic roles nor given…

Examines how students use gendered discourse practices in small peer group settings to accomplish their school tasks. The analysis contributes to the separate worlds hypothesis by showing how Latino children interactionally orient to their peer group as a gendered context. (Author/VWL)

Describes the interactions of 1five mothers inexperienced with deaf people and a deaf five-year-old, a hearing two-year-old and a hearing four and one-half-year-old. The women had fewer successful initiations and shorter interactions with deaf children. Modifications in their communication, especially in relation to "motherese," were…

Examines social differences in expectations of indirectness in conversations between married couples, both Greek and Greek-American. Concludes that Greeks are more likely to expect indirectness in the context presented and that Greek-Americans have retained the Greek communicative patterns. (FL)

Focuses on the work of girls who take on the role of refereeing the course of action within the game of hopscotch. The fieldwork for this article is based on a study of the interaction of bilingual Spanish- and English-speaking girls. The range of experiences within this game challenges characterizations of girls' play as limiting the development…

The study described in this paper illustrates how key features of rhetorical analysis can be operationalized to apply to the study of therapeutic transactions. After a discussion of psychotherapy as an influence process, the paper describes the methodology used in an analysis of tape-recorded discourse between three therapist/client dyads in an…

Describes a study done to determine which intonational parameters are most important to the meaning being conveyed within different social settings. Defines the factors that appear to influence the use of pitch and/or intensity prominence on negative words. Found that, in many situations, interactional rules take precedence over linguistic rules.…

By looking at how two Brazilian and two American businessmen patterned their speech during negotiations, the author indicates how different conventions in discourse organization may affect natural conversation. Stylistic differences, interactional problems, and implications for training business people are discussed. (18 references) (Author/LB)

This paper considers a distinction frequently used in sociolinguistics and ethnography of speaking to describe speech events: their formality or informality. Three principle meanings of "formality" found in the literature concern whether the formality relates to properties of a communicative code, properties of the social setting in…

The relationship between teachers' expectations of students' communicative competence in the classroom and certain aspects of teachers' language during interaction with students was investigated in a study involving 55 nursery school and primary school children and their seven female teachers. The teacher expectation model used in the study…

Among other findings, results of this study strongly indicate that (1) males and females differ in their communication behavior in initial interaction depending on whom they are talking to; and (2) a unique pattern of female interaction does exist which is different from interaction in dyads of other sex composition. (PD)

Television's messages about sex role behavior were analyzed by collecting and coding spot samples of the ten top ranked programs in prime viewing time and proportionate numbers of daytime soap operas and Saturday morning children's programs. The content analysis was based on a relational coding system developed to assess interpersonal…

Sixty half-hour family discussions generated by the "revealed differences technique" were analyzed to determine the emotional intensity and quality (friendliness/attacking) of messages between individuals in families with schizophrenic and "normal" sons. Thirty families in each situation (schizophrenic/normal) were matched for comparison. Both…

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…