The growing presence of children of immigrant families in the public school system in the bilingual region of Catalonia provides us with an opportunity to study how young multilingual and multicultural speakers construct their social competencies and their identity within the specific context of a gate-keeping social institution such as the…

Some ways are discussed in which impositions (potentially face-threatening linguistic actions such as offers, requests, or complaints) are jointly negotiated by native (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) in the process of interaction. Attention is focused on connected discourse features that are as much a part of the linguistic action negotiation…

Discusses the occurrence or nonoccurrence of the contraction of prepositions and determiners in German to emphasize that the communicative function of certain syntactic forms can only be understood, and should therefore only be taught, within the framework of contextual analysis. (CB)

Discusses the theoretical foundations of discourse analysis and intonation and emphasizes that intonation has received little attention in the communicative competence or proficiency movements, despite the fact that intonation is a powerful tool for negotiating meaning, managing interaction, and achieving discourse coherence. (CB)

Discusses how the interviewee first became interested in the application of sociocultural theory to second language acquisition, and what he sees as the appeal of such theory to studies of second language discourse. Discusses current research efforts regarding second language acquisition and describes an experimental language learning classroom.…

Explores the relationship between formulaic language and creative construction in second language acquisition by examining the production of interrogatives in an extensive naturalistic corpus of second language French produced by early classroom learners. (Author/VWL)

Examines discourse on the communal identity that accompanies language shift processes, focusing on an Anglo-Argentine population. A questionnaire was administered to this population concerning what makes an Anglo-Argentine different from either of its perceived component identities. (VWL)

Using conversation analysis as a central tool of analysis, examines the sequential development of talk-in-interaction observed in a small group activity in a Japanese language classroom. Explores the relationship among task instruction, students' reaction to the instruction during their pre-task planning, and the actual development of talk with…

Results of an empirical study of the learners' language of a group of Chinese language students show that topic-controlled deletion is a prominent feature in Chinese that is distinctly different from English and that it may result in English speakers' difficulty in forming Chinese topic chains. (nine references) (LB)

Argues that it is time to begin integrating models of second-language (L2) research, to test and develop integrated models for L2 data, and to develop integrated explanatory theories to explain these data. (22 references) (JL)

Provides an analysis of classroom discourse by identifying the topics in the discourse and following their development. To identify topics, bottom-up approaches based on theme-rheme progression and lexical networks were used together with a top-down schematic approach producing semantic networks of keywords. (Author/VWL)

Examines gender-related patterns of behavior in the second-language classroom and argues that these patterns dovetail with all the other dynamics of language behavior. The article concludes that drawing on the theoretical foundations of frames theory will ensure that research into gender-related patterns of classroom discourse will reflect the…

Suggests that in applied linguistics there has been a collective ignorance of the social constraints operating on exchanges between research interviews and informant interviewees. The article discusses literature from sociology and social psychology that has dealt with this aspect of research interviews. (Author/CK)

Used an elicitation procedure to reveal how 6- and 7-year-old children adapted to the pragmatic context of a story and furnished a remark that would be pragmatically appropriate for a story character to utter. Children's use of self-generated, extra-textual language reveals one way that pragmatic language skill is at work when young children…

Looks at a sample conversation and examines layers of interpretation that different academic traditions have constructed to interpret it. Reviews studies that have compared the discourse of oral interaction in assessment with oral discourse in contexts outside the assessment. Discusses studies that related ways of speaking to cultural values of…