The claims for the huge numbers of students suffering from the "latest scams" in literacy education--learning disability, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, at risk, and hypoglycemia--are driven by political, economic, and social profits with minimal concern for children. While such problems exist, the phrases used to describe these…

Three arguments lead to the conclusion that the English of business is the business of English. First, reluctance to fully appreciate the English of Business stems in part from a serious misunderstanding about the development of written language in the Western tradition. While studying folktales and the origins of myths has made an awareness of…

Since the emergence of the concept of communicative competence, the language teaching field has focused on teaching appropriate language use in addition to general linguistic elements. Speech act studies have contributed to providing appropriate models for second and foreign language learners. In this paper, the effort toward the creation and use…

Jean-Francois Lyotard is considered by many as the pre-eminent non-Marxist philosopher of the "postmodern condition." This paper offers Lyotard's intellectual biography, describes his political writings and subsequent turn to philosophy, and discusses his views on capitalism in the postmodern condition and the problem of the legitimation…

A study examined the linguistic forms in the discourse of speakers during a language test to indicate why they use certain specific forms over others. Ten children were given the Grammatical Analysis of Elicited Language--Simple Sentence Level Test (GAEL), a language proficiency test for hearing-impaired children in the age group of 4 to 8 years.…

In the early 1980s, Shakeshaft and Hanson reviewed the 10 volumes of "Educational Administration Quarterly" (EAQ) that were published during the 1970s for evidence of androcentric bias. Androcentric bias is said to occur when the theory and research is informed by the male perspective. The underlying assumption is that the experience of…

"Northern minorities" is an official term for 26 indigenous peoples who live in a vast northern and Arctic territory (58% of the new Russia, mostly Siberia). These peoples include very different ethnic groups with different cultures and languages, but today they all live in a situation best described as "ethnic catastrophe."…

A study, based on a single sociolinguistic interview conducted in French in Canada, analyzed language patterns typical of daily interaction, particularly that found in argumentation. It is found that speakers show a natural ability to use reasoning and processes to construct an argument adapted to the particular communication situation. Such an…

This book provides an overview of the history, present circumstances, and future prospects of the native languages of Quebec: Abenaki, Algonquin, Atikamekw, Cree, Inuktitut, Micmac, Mohawk, Montagnais, and Naskapi. Chapter 1, "The Situation of Aboriginal Languages in the Americas" (Jacques Maurais), discusses the linguistic demography of…

English nominalizations turn verbs and adjectives into nouns systematically, but their meanings can change unpredictably. In the United States, college composition handbooks urge students to avoid using nominalizations, but elsewhere secondary students learn to write them responsibly and to recognize being manipulated when reading them.…

Choice of second-person pronouns can help explain the intersection of language, personality, and culture. Changes in modern Norway are described in which the polite forms "de,""dem"/"dykk," and "deres"/"dykkar" have been replaced in all except commercial, government, or ultra-polite speech by the…

Section A of the Journalism History section of the proceedings contains the following 10 papers: "Mixed Messages in a Progressive Newspaper: The Milwaukee Journal and Woman Suffrage, 1911-1912" (Elizabeth Burt); "The Search for Unity: The Importance of the Black Press in the Emigration/Colonization Issues of the 1800s" (Bernell…

Many linguists, sociologists, and educators see the nonstandard form of speech used by African-American students as a substandard, imperfect copy of Standard English (SE), marred by a number of careless and ignorant errors, rather than as something to be studied and understood in its own right. Many African-American college students continue to…

Examples are given of real lexical errors made by learner writers, and consideration is given to the way in which three learners' dictionaries could deal with the lexical items that were misused. The dictionaries were the "Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary," the "Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English," and the "Chambers Universal Learners'…

This paper examines the Turkish origins of a number of Cypriot-Greek words, explaining how some of these words have undergone a semantic shift. Words of Turkish origin can be divided into three classes: (1) culturally borrowed, those words that introduced a new concept into Cypriot-Greek and have no purely Greek equivalent; (2) doublets, those…