Examines three perspectives on native and second language learning, attempting to integrate ideas from psychology, sociolinguistics, and linguistics into contemporary developments in language pedagogy and syllabus design, and giving special attention to such areas as socialization, self-regulation, and the role of school language programs. (95…

Explores language as a cultural commodity through examination of the different values of rhetoric in Arabic- and English-speaking cultures, as evidenced by the language of the war against Iraq, and through examination of the role of language in determining economic status in France, the United States, and England. (18 references) (Author/CB)

Three recent books take up different positions in the on-going debate about how, and out of what, to construct a theory of second language (L2) acquisition. Johnson (2004) advocates a "dialogically based approach", inspired by Vygotsky's sociocultural theory and Bakhtin's "dialogized heteroglossia", with which she would replace what she views as a…

In a study published in 1987, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson proposed that an abstract sociolinguistic principle guides and constrains a speaker's choice of language, and that this principle explains the politeness phenomenon in conversation. Moreover, central to this principle is the concept of "face," or personal self-image,…

The notion of "textual norms" refers to sociocultural conventions that define the "well-formedness" of a text. Because well-formedness in texts is characterized by convention, different conventions may exist in a community and lead to norm conflicts when used in actual text generation. In this article, two types of norm conflict are described. In…

Selected papers from a symposium that was a component of the National Institute of Education's Assessment of Language Proficiency of Bilingual Persons Project are presented. The project's objectives were to pursue basic research on the nature of language proficiency and its measurement and to provide teachers with current knowledge of language…

An examination of the social psychological basis of style shifting suggests that, contrary to Labovian theory, many style shifts are not a function of shifts in attention to speech and that there are other more explanatory ways of analyzing style shifts. Some reasons for this view are: (1) attention to speech is sometimes negatively correlated…

The first concept proposed by this paper for explaining the global dynamics of linguistic phenomena is "language power," the total investment in time, money, and energy that is made for the purpose of learning or preserving a particular language. Indicators that become factors in the formula for determining language power include…

Presuppositions, those propositions which the sentence is not primarily about but which have to be established prior to the utterance of a sentence in order for communication to go smoothly, are discussed. The notions of the Kiparskys (1970), Lakoff (1970, 1971), Fillmore (1971), Karttunen (1971), and Horn (1969) are summarized with examples in an…

The present monograph is second in a series of reports on research work edited by Basil Bernstein of the University of London. The research, carried out by the Sociological Research Unit of the University of London Institute of Education, is concerned with the inter-relationship between culture, social organization and orientations towards certain…

In analyzing utterances whose singular property is to become true simply by being uttered, this article discusses the theory of explicit performatives and proposes an alternative explanation which focuses on meaning rather than on the fact of these utterances are speech acts. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Presents the theoretical and methodological bases of a study designed to test the validity of Bernstein's theories on the role of language in school segregation. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/CLK)

Deals with patterns of limited borrowing in Tarahumara, or Raramuri, a Uto-Aztecan language in northern Mexico. Probes the sociolinguistic constraints that have apparently caused Raramuri to have borrowed surprisingly little from Spanish. (Author/RM)

Examines four theories which assume both that Middle Arabic was not spread throughout pre-Islamic Arabia and that the modern sedentary dialects did not develop out of the Poetic-Koranic Koine. Aspects of comparative reconstruction, language characteristics, contact history, and substratum influence are discussed. (CB)

Proposes a revision and expansion of Schumann's (1978b) model of pidginization as it relates to second language learning. A distinction is made between sociocultural aspects of the pidginization cycle and the acquisitional processes of pidginization, creolization, and decreolization. (Author/AM)