Reports on research conducted by the Queensland Centre of the Adult Literacy and Numeracy Australian Research Consortium within the civil construction industry. Argues that the dominant discourse of new capitalism adopt the rhetoric of worker empowerment while actually implementing technologies of top-down control. (Adjunct ERIC Clearinghouse for…

Explores variation in the performance of one nonnative speaker in three different conversations with friends. The chief difference between the conversations is that the interlocutors use different interactional features that are related to their different levels of proficiency in English. (Author/VWL)

Shows the interaction of the global and the local aspects of British Caribbean identities in talk. By viewing identities as texts of social practice that are constructed and displayed both through topic and stylistic changes, shows the possibility for reading speakers' identities in and through talk. (Author/VWL)

Instructions are an under-researched aspect of classroom discourse. In this paper, we attempt to describe the functional structure of teacher instructions using the framework proposed by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975). We examine nine directing transactions or sets of instructions from four lessons taught on an English for Academic Purposes course…

Chinese characters are used in both Chinese and Japanese writing systems. When literate speakers of either language experience problems in finding or understanding words, they often resort to using Chinese characters or "kanji" (i.e., Chinese characters used in Japanese writing) in their talk, a practice known as "brush talk" ("bitan" in Chinese,…

"Talk-in-interaction: Multilingual perspectives" offers original studies of interaction in a range of languages and language varieties, including Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Swahili, Thai, and Vietnamese; monolingual and bilingual interactions; and activities designed for second or foreign language learning. Conducted…

Correction and repair as components of an instructional practice that facilitates learning have figured prominently in research on classroom-based second and foreign language learning. Recent studies incorporating a conversation analytic (CA) perspective on second language acquisition (SLA) have also focused on repair and correction. From a CA…

This study examined the development of spoken discourse among L2 learners of Japanese who received extensive practice on grammatical chunks. Participants in this study were 22 college students enrolled in an elementary Japanese course. They received instruction on a set of grammatical chunks in class through communicative drills and the…

This dissertation presents an innovative approach to the development and empirical evaluation of Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) technology used for teaching and learning. It introduces IADE (Intelligent Academic Discourse Evaluator), a new web-based AWE program that analyzes research article Introduction sections and generates immediate,…

The aim of this study was to investigate discourse markers in descriptive compositions of 90 Iranian students who were selected from two universities. Without any instruction, they were given a topic to write a descriptive composition per week for 8 weeks. 598 compositions were collected, and they were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively by…

Employing critical discourse analysis (CDA), this paper examines the attempt to bridge a Canadian adult second language policy with an employment skills policy. The result is a third policy intended to improve language education and employment skills training for immigrants. The analysis reveals that the knowledge economy and human capital theory…

A symposium on discourse analysis and language learning is summarized. Discourse analysis can be divided into six fields of research: syntax, the amount of syntactic organization required for different types of discourse, large speech events, intra-sentential cohesion in text, speech acts, and unequal power discourse. Research on speech events and…

During the past ten years, research on second language acquisition (SLA) has expanded; at the same time, different models and hypotheses have been proposed to explain and account for the processes underlying SLA. Four models seem to be dominant at the present time: (1) the monitor model, which distinguishes between implicit or unconscious language…

Discusses a study of discourse patterns in the learning of second language oral skills. The study, based on research traditions such as ethnography of communication and conversation analysis, adopts as its main theoretical framework Vygotsky's theory of social origin of language and cognition. (DJD)

Describes cross-cultural study of conversational interaction as means to explain how much talking people do, when, why and how they talk and the topics they feel appropriate in conversation. Suggests conversational behavior from nonnative speakers reflects a difference in communicative style transferred from another language and culture.…