Twelve community translators provided verbal accounts of their strategies while completing translations of a short leaflet from English into one of seven community languages. They adopted approaches wholly oriented to the needs of a specific ethnic minority groups in British society, resulting in a markedly sociocultural translation model.…

Twenty different monologues were analyzed; and the interrelating roles that clause relations, lexico-grammatical cohesion, and intonation choices play in creating cohesive monologue were examined. It is argued that these linguistic resources can be exploited by speakers to signal underlying concepts and help listeners interpret the text. (Contains…

A study is reported that provides a remedial pedagogic grammar for Arabs learning English as a Second Language. Focus is on written English and written Arabic. Suggestions for teaching are provided. (21 references) (LB)

Two issues related to transnational financial reporting are examined: (1) the extent to which the professional registers of accounting and finance in different countries exhibit semantic equivalence, and (2) strategies of communications that are adopted in transnational reporting when straightforward mappings cannot be performed. (14 references)…

Black English (BE) and standard English are treated as two different closely related linguistic systems that coexist in African-American linguistics. Focus is on a middle-class female informant who appears to be a balanced bilingual and who offers counter evidence to the claim that BE is spoken mainly by poor and uneducated persons. (13…

Fourteen matched pairs of German-speaking and English-speaking children were tested for their knowledge of grammatical morphology and expressive vocabulary. The finding that the German-speaking children earned higher scores than did the English-speaking children adds to the literature that documents language-specific sensitivity to particular…

The effects of feedback (explicit correction) on the learning of morphological generalizations were studied in 79 adult native speakers of English with varying levels of proficiency in French. Among the findings was that the learning of absolute exceptions was more likely among advanced learners. (69 references) (Author/LB)

The speech act of apologizing in English between Chileans and Australians is examined in terms of the frequency, distribution, and function of apology-strategies. It is argued that positive politeness strategies are more frequently used in Spanish than English, and the sex of the apologizer and recipient must be considered. (41 references)…

The Confucian educational tradition and the national examination system shape Chinese students' learning styles. A study of 1,076 students studying English as a foreign language suggests that modern Chinese students are receptive to newer methods and learning styles but that this openness declines with increased exposure to foreign teachers. (19…

A questionnaire surveyed how multilingual speakers in Singapore express their social identities through language, how they relate to their language, and how they perceive the various English accents to which they are exposed. Respondents related more to the local Singapore accent than to British or American English. Implications for the…

A study with 80 Saudi English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) students found that EFL learners performed better on temporal clauses that occurred initially in the sentence than those that occurred finally. The EFL learners faced problems similar to those of first-language learners. (29 references) (Author/LB)

Most analyses of linguistic errors set up unidimensional categories of grammatical, lexical, and semantic deviations. A two-dimensional classification system is described that formed the basis of a study of phenomena of foreign-language interaction. Thirteen classes of linguistic deviation emerged in the study. (Contains 37 references.) (Author/LB)

In a study of development of automaticity in second-language word recognition, 105 English-speakers speaking French performed multiple lexical-decision tasks, and differences in coefficient of variation of lexical decision reaction time were compared cross- sectionally and longitudinally. Results confirm that with extended learning experience, the…

Examines the use of contextual frames in a sample of essays from undergraduates at the University of Zimbabwe. The different structures used to frame claims are described, and their functions are discussed, with comments on their relative weakness. Conclusions are drawn about the main purposes for which students use contextual frames, and…

Subjects the central tenets of universal grammar theory to critical examination with the assumptions that its structure-dependency principle is falsifiable and the native Korean speakers' initial brain states are devoid of English syntactic properties. (Author/VWL)