This series, designed for use in inservice teacher workshops, addresses the question, "How do children and teachers use language to get things done?" The transcribed classroom discourse presented and discussed in each volume illustrates functional language in a real context based on the videotaping of undoctored classroom events from…

This article reports on the first four colloquia at Neuchatel. Research in the areas of discourse analysis, the discovery of interpretive processes, and communicative competence should shape the evolution of second language teaching. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/CLK)

Examines various criteria that have been proposed for evaluating the increasing number of empirical studies carried out using qualitative research methods and demonstrates how such criteria may privilege certain forms of qualitative research while excluding others. Select existing evaluative criteria for qualitative research proposed by applied…

Analyzes the extensive use of personal examples and stories in the academic essays of students who are nonnative speakers of English. Draws on a large database of college examination essays to compare the use of personal examples in essays written by native and nonnative speakers. Finds nonnative students not only use examples more often than…

It is argued that inservice training courses for language teachers are too often based on ad hoc notions of what the teacher needs and are oriented toward the interests of course organizers and/or authorities. English-as-a-Foreign-Language teaching in Switzerland is examined, and two sections of teacher-teacher discourse are analyzed. (Contains 18…

"Analysing Genre," by Vijay K. Bhatia, is a timely addition to the literature on genre analysis in English for specific purposes. It is divided into three parts: the first provides theoretical background; the second explains how genre analysis works in different academic and professional settings; and the third exemplifies the…

The culturally marked discursive style in Italian and English public service encounters are contrasted by concentrating on the management of request-compliance and request-noncompliance. Linguistic realization of "evidentiality" (the expression of attitudes toward communicated information and the information source) is analyzed from bookstore…

One fruitful line of research has been to explore the local linguistic as well as global rhetorical patterns of particular genres in order to identify their recognizable structural identity, or what Bhatia (1999: 22) calls "generic integrity". In terms of methodology, to date most genre-based studies have employed one or the other of Swales'…

A study examined internal structure of the Discourse Completion Test (DCT), a technique used to elicit data in sociolinguistic research, and effects of systematic modification to its situational prompt on subject response. The DCT is a questionnaire containing situations, briefly described, designed to elicit a particular speech act. Subjects read…

The following articles appear in this issue: "Changing Views of Language in Applied Linguistics" (Gillian Brown); "Society, Education, and Language: The Last 2000 (and the next 20?) Years of Language Teaching" (Michael Stubbs); "The Secret Life of Grammar Translation" (Malcolm J. Bensen); "Changing Views of…

Examines writing in Lithuanian, a language that has received little scholarly attention in the West and particularly the variety of Lithuanian used by the Lithuanian immigrant community in the United States. Examines articles from both Lithuanian and American Lithuanian newspapers to see how the written American variety differs from native norms…

Stresses the importance of "teacher talk" in the foreign language classroom. Recommendations include fitting the level of language to the learner, balancing practice of both lexicon and grammar, limiting redundancy, and suiting content of the language to each sentence's specific purpose. Examples of faulty teacher talk in Spanish are…

Disfluent phenomena such as pauses, hesitations, and repairs are investigated in 42 short samples of spontaneous speech of native French speakers and learners of French. It is found that native speakers attend to the construction of the referent, whereas learners are more concerned with syntactic construction. (Contains 14 references.) (Author/LB)

Written apologies of deaf students were examined from data obtained from a discourse completion test. Results show that both word choice and word order give a routinized feel to the apologies, in part attributable to American Sign Language; and that strategy choices may reflect a culture-specific view of social offenses. (Contains 44 references.)…