For the past twenty years or so, the author has been fortunate to write for a fairly broad audience. While he was teaching, or running an educational program, or doing research, he was also composing opinion pieces or commentaries about the work he was doing. This process of writing with part of his attention on the classroom or research site and…

Each profession has its own insider language. Thick with acronyms and polysyllabics, such argot helps colleagues communicate complex ideas precisely and with as few words as possible. But even by the standards of technical talk, the jargon of education often seems unnecessarily, perhaps willfully, opaque--even to other educators. To the…

This article discusses professional language and communication in real-life settings and provides a critical overview of research on language for specific purposes. Ideas for renewing this field of study are presented. (78 references) (MDM)

The technical complexity of the language of academic journals is discussed in terms of graduate students' needs for information, especially in developing countries. An examination of problems in two articles in "Language" and one in "American Anthropologist" points out the nature of the difficulties and some of the solutions. (Author/LB)

An ethnographic study examined slang as spoken on campuses of two universities in the United States, one on the West Coast and one in the Midwest. Subjects were students from Intercultural Communication classes, who served as participant/observers and data gatherers. Subjects were instructed to collect slang terms that they heard on campus and,…

This learning activity package is designed to help apprentices understand some of the different ways in which words can be used to mean different things, depending on where and when one uses the words. It provides examples of words and phrases that are used in the workplace in ways different from the way they are used in regular conversation. Five…