Discusses orality as an historical feature of African American language habits. Provides historical evidence of the literate values and habits of African Americans since the early 1800s. Resists the tendency to deny variation in the habits and values of ethnic groups. (HB)

Presents an interpretive study of 1 family's discourse concerning aggression between 2 brothers (9-years, 9-months and 11-years, 11-months old). Analyzes 10 parental strategies, representing all the turns within a long conversation in which parents took the lead in promoting their younger son's narrative and logical understanding of his offensive…

Topics addressed in this review include ethnology and traditional dialect study, philology, linguistic conversion analysis, and interaction within the social sciences. Finland's size affects these research activities and research on spoken interaction is shifting to group projects with a common focus. (Contains 68 references.) (JP)

Considers the relationship between the native language of interpreters and the second language acquired by them after childhood. Discusses differences between first- and second-language acquisition, storage, and usage. Indicates areas of second-language acquisition research calling for additional research. (HB)

A literature review of listening comprehension research covers five areas: text characteristics; interlocutor characteristics; task characteristics (variation in listening purpose); listener characteristics; and process characteristics (variation in the listener's cognitive activities and the nature of the speaker/listener interaction). (Contains…

Word learning by young children is viewed as a problem deriving from the use of forms of discourse texts. Uses of causal and temporal terms in private speech by a child studied longitudinally from 1;9 to 3;0 are analyzed from this perspective. (Contains 38 references.) (JL)

Describes the essential factors of developmental changes in argumentative writing behavior of children between the ages of 10 and 16, in particular on 4 tasks: an argumentative writing task, a textuality task, an argumentative script inference task, and an argumentativity judgment task. (SR)

Discusses various quantitative and qualitative techniques used to examine nonlinguists' beliefs about language, focusing on content-orientated approaches to conversations with African Americans about African American Vernacular English. Approaches to discoursal meaning based on vantage theory and argument analysis are also considered. (MDM)

Examines students' summaries of three lectures. Finds that the percentage, but not the number, of propositions correlated positively with the accuracy scores in the summaries. Suggests that analyses of errors, lexical substitutions, discrepancies in grades, and differences in students' scores for the different lectures revealed interesting results…

Japanese college students (n=483) learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) read passages in English in one of three forms: (1) native baseline; (2) simplified; or (3) elaborated. The study found that comprehension was highest among learners reading the simplified version but was not significantly different from those reading the elaborated…

Summarizes the current state of research in conversation analysis, referring primarily to six different perspectives that have developed from the philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and linguistics disciplines. These include pragmatics; speech act theory; interactional sociolinguistics; ethnomethodology; ethnography of communication; and…

Two experiments were performed on the ability of children and adults to understand and produce locative verbs. Results confirm that children tend to make syntactic errors with sentences containing "fill" and "empty," encoding the content argument as direct object. (33 references) (JL)

Epistemological breaks in several of the humanities disciplines in the twentieth century (existentialism, phenomenology, and traditional film theory) are traced. The breaks are attributed to each discipline's attempt to become scientific. In this process is seen the emergence of the discipline of film semiology in France in the 1960s. (34…

Reviews the conceptual, curricular, and empirical bases of task-based language teaching and suggests future trends, concluding that the conceptual and empirical bases need to be extended both substantively and methodologically. (38 references) (CB)

Reviews research on student motivation for second-language learning from the standard applied linguistics approach. The utility of other concepts of motivation to such research conducted at the micro, classroom, and syllabus levels is discussed as well as informal, out-of-class, and long-term factors. (188 references) (Author/CB)