Demonstrates through a case study and a participant observation study that siblings interact about television in such a way that the form and content of their talk creates a learning context. Concludes that, despite concerns about "zombie" viewers, children are not passive, unresponsive recipients of television. (PD)

Argues that when a parent or teacher reads the same story to children several times, they begin to attend to different aspects of the story than they did on the first reading. Discusses four changes in children's responses that occur with repeated readings. (FL)

Discusses "technological tyranny" and its demeaning of language and learning. (FL)

In order to compare the foregrounding strategies of native speakers of English and advanced learners of English as a second language, 15 native speakers and 35 advanced learners produced play-by-play descriptions of the unfolding action in an animated videotape. Results show that the two groups use different strategies of foregrounding. (SED)

Focuses on the narrative function to show how children can build on another speaker's turns in conversation and can build on their own utterances as they speak. Analyzes children's dialogs and narratives to highlight the primacy of the oral language arts as they are enacted in daily conversation and play. (HTH)

Defines exploratory language as that used to explore thoughts rather than for starting already thought of ideas, then shows how three 10th-grade students profited from exploratory writing for different reasons. (FL)

Probes the way sexism is fostered by four different but related processes of communication: overgeneralization, exaggeration, metamorphical extension, and the adaptation of behavior to fit the exaggerations and metaphors that grew out of the overgeneralizations. (EL)

Describes two teacher educators' experiences while exchanging a journal of dialog on their teaching. Discusses the language functions and themes that emerged in the journals, as well as the journals' future directions. (HTH)

This case study examines how the press, radio, and television were mobilized to promote, evaluate, and teach in a government campaign to replace Chinese dialects with Mandarin among the Chinese population. (PD)

Describes how many of the phrasings attacked by cliche-hunters as trite, worn-out, or unoriginal can be legitimately defended on other grounds, by the criteria of speed and clarity, familiarity, social bonding, and personal delight. (CRH)

Laments the trend toward the use of management and administrative jargon as the language of school analysis. Endorses a new discourse and mode of analysis of the nature of schooling that would indict the shortcomings but also reveal new possibilities for organizing school experiences. (HTH)

Considers register (factors that vary in situational contexts and produce differences in meaning intent and meaning exchange) variance with its accompanying language transactions during written language events involving children and adults. Illustrates register variance with the writing and drawing of a four-year-old and a first-grader. (HTH)

Uses techniques of the study of conversational analysis in oral language in the study of American Sign Language conversations, and concludes that such conversations are structured in ways that parallel those of spoken language. (FL)

Suggests some reasons why the exploration and description of language function is often an untidy exercise but, none-the-less very rewarding and rich in implication for English teaching. (Author/RK)