Investigates interaction between application of communicative strategies and narrative discourse features. The data draws upon research in narrative discourse collected from one student of Moroccan Arabic. The study suggests that the subject resorted to a number of strategies to compensate for her linguistic deficiencies and that application of…

This book is a comparative study of the syntax of Arabic dialects based on natural language data recorded in Morocco, Egypt, Syria, and Kuwait. These four dialect regions are distinct and geographically diverse and representative of four distinct dialect groups. The analytical approach of the book is both functional and descriptive, combining…

This paper examines the pedagogical implications of ascribing to sociocultural theory in the classroom, reviewing commonplace terms and concepts that may have lost their true meaning and intent through interpretation and misuse. The paper returns to the initial focus of sociocultural theory, cognition and the mind. Through transcripts of a…

The following articles appear in this issue: "Changing Views of Language in Applied Linguistics" (Gillian Brown); "Society, Education, and Language: The Last 2000 (and the next 20?) Years of Language Teaching" (Michael Stubbs); "The Secret Life of Grammar Translation" (Malcolm J. Bensen); "Changing Views of…

Tape-recorded conversations provide a basis for analysis of fixed expressions, cliches, filled pauses and false starts in spontaneous speech. The meaning of these findings for second language learning and instruction is discussed. (CHK)

Examines the discrepancy between the conventional categories by which five Black South African English language learners in their first year at a historically White, Anglophone tertiary institution are identified--"disadvantaged,""underprepared,""second language"--as well as the way these women identify themselves.…

Discusses a study of concord phenomena in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. Findings indicate the presence of disfluencies, including apparent corrections, in about 15% of the relevant tokens in the corpus of recorded speech data. It is concluded that speech is not overly laden with errors, and there is nothing in the data to mislead the language…

Rhetorical strategies employed in three intercultural negotiations between British and Singaporean businessmen are examined. Communication breakdowns are attributed more to a lack of the will to adapt and understand, rather than intercultural differences, pointing out the importance of sensitivity and flexibility in adapting to different…

Examines the construction of children's identities as writers through their positioning in the multiplicity of official and unofficial discourses available to them in the primary classroom. Uses ethnographic observation to focus on how identities are constructed in the process of text construction, and the intersections of ethnicity, gender, and…

Examines incidental cultural knowledge displays by two nonnative-English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) in their intensive English program classrooms. Focuses on the nature of the discourse produced in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) classes taught by NNESTs. Analysis of videotaped classroom data indicates that a wide and unpredictable range of…

Functional analysis of longitudinal, conversational interlanguage data from two Vietnamese learners of English focused on the emergence of complex syntax in interlanguage development. The interdependence of different linguistic levels in interlanguage development was demonstrated. (Author/CB)

Explores similarities and differences in native- and second- language referential communication through review of an experiment in which native Dutch speakers described unconventional abstract shapes first in Dutch and then in English. Subjects exhibited a preference, in both languages, for describing shapes in a holistic rather than segmental…

Investigates the processes involved in the learning of Arabic subject-verb agreement by Australians. It is hypothesized that the amount and direction of information encoding motivated by certain semantic categories as well as the availability of discourse cues would influence the learners' performance in subject-verb agreement tasks. (27…

Discusses the design and use of the Computer Model for Language Acquisition (COMOLA), a computer program designed to analyze syntactic development in second-language learners by examining their oral utterances. Also compares COMOLA to the recently developed Computer-Aides Linguistic Analysis (COALA) program. (MDM)