This article reports on a case study of negotiation that occurred in peer group oral interactions under assessment conditions. Discourse analysis was used to illustrate how participants negotiated and co-constructed the assessment format itself as well as meaning exchange sequences. Analyses of the data point to the advantage of using peer group…

"On Teacher Inquiry" could be read as an answer to the question, "Teacher Research: What's in it for the students?" This new volume in the "NCRLL Collection" addresses the relationships among teacher research, teacher practice, and student learning. The authors observe, analyze, raise questions, design methodologies, and build relationships with…

This paper reports on the processes experienced in the development of a language programme in a high school in the western suburbs of Sydney in 2006 and represents the ideas and views of the two key participants. We consider the different perspectives held by the key participants on the project and how these need to be worked through in order to…

In this study of the placement of sentence negation in third language acquisition (L3), we argue that there is a qualitative difference between the acquisition of a true second language (L2) and the subsequent acquisition of an L3. Although there is considerable evidence for L2 influence on vocabulary acquisition in L3, not all researchers believe…

Studies on classroom interaction have typically focused on relationships between turn-taking patterns and some larger unit of analysis of varying length and nature. However, two questions still left unanswered are how teachers talk differently from students in general and how linguistic variation between two participants might relate to…

This article explores relationships between designing and making in the work of children within the age range 5-11 when engaged in practical modelling tasks. The notion of the model is explored from the perspective of concrete representations. It is suggested that concrete models may be used as hypotheses from which to test ideas about the nature…

This study sets out to examine the pragmatic competence of Cantonese adult learners of English possessing different levels of proficiency when performing the speech act of requesting for a formal purpose in writing. Pragmatic judgment--one of the two aspects of pragmatic competence--was examined by studying the most proficient group (i.e., native…

A study investigated children's understanding (3-, 6-, 9-, and 12-year-olds) of the different levels of meaning of the cognitive verb "know" as defined by the abstractness and conceptual difficulty hierarchy of W. S. Hall, E. K. Scholnick, and A. T. Hughes. Results indicated that cognitive verb knowledge increased with development and…

Papers from a conference on cartography in geolinguistics include: "The Political Importance of Visualisation of Language Contact" (Yvo J. D. Peeters); "Some Considerations on People and Boundaries" (Guy Heraud); "Geolinguistic Developments and Cartographic Problems" (Colin H. Williams, John E. Ambrose); "A…

This study reports on preliminary findings of two research projects conducted during the 1988-89 and 1990-91 in Cordoba, Argentina, that examined fixed, idiomatic, Spanish-language expressions that are very common, but often ignored, in oral Spanish discourse. Study 1 subjects were 13 university-educated, adults, born in the city; study 2 subjects…

The discussion of Nweh, a Bantu language, focuses on a group of adjectives that can occur in positions where one would expect a noun, and which appear to enter noun classification. Specifically, the reasons that these adjectives have noun properties and that the pronominal class marker for the adjective is invariant are investigated. First, the…

An analysis of the polysemic nature of prepositions in pidgins and creoles (PCs) looks at the analytic nature of PCs and the pervasive variability in their grammars, and then focuses on usage of the preposition "fo" in Anglo-Nigerian Pidgin (ANP), likely borrowed from the English "for." It is argued that while this is not the…

Much earlier controversy surrounding the Chinese "ba" construction stems from dissention over whether or not "ba" has any independent semantic content. "Ba" was assumed either to be a purely formal particle whose function was to assign case, or to have semantic content translating into thematic content. However, under the hypothesis that abstract…

A variety of techniques for collecting and analyzing information about the natural use of natural languages is surveyed, emphasizing the importance of recognizing the properties of a research task that make a given technique more or less suitable to it rather than comparing techniques globally and ranking them absolutely. An initial goal is to…

It is argued that an area of linguistic research ripe for exploration is how the speaker actually makes use of linguistic knowledge in the production or reception of utterances. It is proposed that speech production is a lexically driven rather than semantically driven process and that the speaker's procedural competence is lexico-syntactic in…