The present study analyzed how a group of young Spanish-speaking English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) science class responded to an instructional unit integrating attention to functional language and an inquiry-oriented approach to science. Working in cooperation with the researchers, a…

Understanding the linguistic and rhetorical patterns of an academic discipline strengthens students' abilities to write in professional settings. Data-driven learning and corpus-linguistic methods can increase this understanding and should be considered valuable contributors to any writing curriculum. In this paper, I present a case history on…

Professional and academic discourse is characterised by a specific phraseology, which usually poses problems for students. This paper investigates atypical verb+noun collocations in a corpus of English technical writing of Spanish students. I focus on the type of verbs that most frequently occurred in these awkward or questionable combinations and…

The purpose of this study was to explore the role of occupation in school-based occupational therapy practice. The research questions were (1) How do school-based occupational therapists describe the role of occupation during intervention? (2) Which theories of occupation do school-based occupational therapists associate with their own practice?…

Discusses the noun-plus-adjective construction in contemporary German and problems in translating this pattern into English. (AM)

The analysis of 2,369 finite clauses in 11 English-language academic articles on oceanography attempts to establish the semantic characteristics of "by" phrases as a step toward understanding the circumstances in which authors were likely to use the prepositional phrase following a passive verb form. (CB)

Papers on nominal syntagma as objects in discourse include: "Quelques notions utiles a la semantique des descripteurs nominaux" ("Some Useful Notions on the semantics of Nominal Descriptors") (Alain Berrendonner); "Note sur le statut semantique et la fonction de quelques relatives integrees" ("Note on the…

Expounds Firth's views on the problems of translation and surveys theories of translation by some Firthian linguists. Defines the concept of meaning and the concept of varieties within a language, discussing various dialect categories and other categories that relate to constant features of speakers' and writers' use. (MES)

Efforts to simplify language used in consumer documents come from the consumer movement and a public disillusioned with big business and government. Even before President Carter's 1978 executive order mandating simplification in government regulations, some agencies were revising regulations for clarity. However, these efforts were based on too…

Legal language is discussed in the context of concern about the comprehensibility of consumer documents and the trend toward simplification of the language used in these documents. Specific features of legal language and its functions within the legal community and society are identified. As a primary tool of the legal profession, legal language…

Analysis of how students of English for Science and Engineering use certain categories of nouns in their technical writing projects revealed a significant use of "sub-technical" and "text-structuring" words serving both referential and discourse-oriented functions. The use of matching or cloze-type and open-ended writing exercises to improve…

This article discusses the differences in vocabulary referring to statements of accounts between colloquial language and technical language, and between French and English. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

By comparing the strategies involved in creating a poem and in writing a government report, this paper presents a model of reading and writing processes for exploring the relationship between literature and technical writing and for pointing out the similarities in the use of texts. The model assumes that the student approaches a piece of writing…

A useful device in revising technical reports is the metaphor of entropy, which refers to the amount of disorder that is present in a system. Applied to communication theory, high entropy would correspond to increased amounts of unfamiliar or useless information in a text. Since entropy in rhetorical systems increases with the unfamiliarity of…

Thematic progression (TP) is examined in the text of a communication between a cardiologist and a general practitioner concerning a patient, offering a clinical diagnosis of the patient's condition. Analysis of the discourse looks at the field, tenor, and mode of the communication as a context for TP. The methods of analysis are first described,…