This case study examines the patterns of participation of one US-educated refugee student in a university intensive English program (IEP). Specifically, I illustrate how the focal student used her advanced oral proficiency and prior experience with US educational norms and practices to engage in various interactional behaviours, such as shifting…

Many individuals who work with young children between birth and age 8 assume that literacy activities must be planned and executed as elaborate, formal lessons. The increasing pressure seeping through national accountability measures and the renewed focus on early literacy is trickling down to this age group. The Division for Early Childhood of…

The goal of this study was to examine the role of Indian bilingual parents' book reading practices on the development of the children's oral language, narrative and literacy skills in English, their second language. About 24 bilingual children from two preschools in Bangalore, India were tested in schools in English on receptive vocabulary,…

University graduates across Europe face increasing professional language and intercultural demands. In France, foreign language competence is to be assessed for incoming undergraduates and Master's graduates are required to demonstrate "mastery" of at least one foreign language. Institutions are responsible for defining…

"Interactive Shared Book Reading" is a general practice that adults may use when reading with children and is intended to enhance young children's language and literacy skills. Typically, "Interactive Shared Book Reading" involves an adult reading a book to a child or a small group of children and using a variety of techniques…

An ethnographic study examined illiterates and their understanding of literacy. The theoretical background of the study is based on the thesis of "contemporary orality": that India is a fundamentally oral culture that retains all the characteristics of primary orality (Walter Ong's term) through the use of speech as the dominant medium…

An overview of the babbling stage in child language acquisition, which occurs normally at age six months to one year, looks at research on this period. The babbling stage is preceded by arbitrary infant vocalization and is succeeded by production of simple but recognizable words. Babbling represents a period of increasing pattern and articulatory…

This paper starts from the premise that Sperber and Wilson's account of verbal irony is adequate and generalizable. It can be successfully extended to account for verbal irony in literary discourse by paying particular attention to the questions of attribution, recontextualization and attitude communication. The paper further argues that…

This report is based on the idea that interaction in business negotiations must be describable in terms that accord with the priorities of the interactors themselves. A descriptive model is discussed that aims to accommodate and integrate approaches that are essentially linguistic and those that are business oriented. It is argued that a dynamic…

Spectographic analysis of speech calls into question two common assumptions of reading teachers: (1) that words are independent units of speech, and (2) that phonemes, the minimal speech sounds needed to change meaning, actually exist. Spectographs reproduce the physical sounds made in speech without any human or psychological interpretation. When…

Two theories of speech appear to parallel each other closely, though one (E. Nuttall) is concerned mainly with speech from a functional perspective, and the other (F. Williams and R. Naremore) presents a developmental hierarchy of language form and function. Nuttall suggests there are two main origins of speech: sounds of discomfort (cries,…

Indicates that the main determinant of implicitness, when defined in terms of "inferrable" vs. "evoked" information, was the variable of content, not that of modality: Abstract texts contained more inferrable information than did narrative texts, regardless of modality. (NKA)

Examines the interdependence of language and image in a poster series by Shosaku Arakawa and relates the displacement of writing from the book page to his canvases or posters to theories of performative language to show that his work is itself performance. (DF)

Results indicated that the two treatment conditions (speech and speech-sign) did not differ significantly for either learning or generalization with 10 Down's Syndrome three-seven year olds. The data did, however, indicate that individual patterns of acquisition were evident among the children. Caution is advised concerning automatic adoption or…

Twenty-five hearing-impaired young adults participated in English courses focusing on reading and writing skills only (control group) or on reading, writing, and complementary oral languagt instruction (experimental group). Experimental Ss demonstrated significant improvement in grammatical correctness of spoken English and in speech…