How would translators approach a process in which they have to make decisions on mapping the grammatically enforced regular number mechanism of a language such as English onto a system like Japanese, where there is no regular coding of number in a noun phrase? Utilizing the concepts of motivation for representation of number, and of "formal-shift"…

The concurrent trends of globalisation and "indigenisation" affecting the English language (varieties) around the world pose some interesting questions for language planning and reform issues (e.g. Phillipson, 1992; Pennycook, 1994; Crystal, 1997). With this project we examine the impact of these competing trends on "corpus planning" relating to…

On the basis of 572 examples taken from seven million-word corpora of written English the present study--which complements the spoken data-based studies of Oberlander & Delin (1996) and Weinert & Miller (1996)--explores the relationship between information structure and discourse role with reversed what-clefts. The study confirms the typically…

This paper will examine the discourse of one experienced teacher of Indigenous children in lessons observed as part of the Conductive Hearing Loss (CHL) project conducted by Edith Cowan University in Perth. In the classroom observed, all the children were Indigenous and the teacher was aware that some children were suffering from CHL. This…

Most studies in the area of doctor-patient communication focus on the talk that doctors perform during the consultation, leaving under-researched the discourse developed by patients. This article deconstructs and identifies the functions and forms of the voices (i.e. specific forms of talk) that Chilean patients employ in their interactions with…

This article reports on an investigation into the loss of morphology expressing temporality in the Italian of second generation Italo-Australians. The purpose of the study is to verify whether the loss of Italian tense and aspect morphology proceeds from marked to unmarked, where markedness is defined on the basis of formal and semantic criteria.…

In the process of language shift from the immigrant languages to English, everyday communication within the family can become increasingly problematic due to strong divergences in the linguistic competences of the older and the younger generations. This article explores the process of language mediation between different generations, as it occurs…

The present study examines the relationship between learner participation and accuracy improvement in the use of some features of standard Italian, which were taught over a period of intensive grammatical instruction in a tertiary classroom setting. The subjects of the study are 60 tertiary learners of L2 Italian from a variety of Italian dialect…

Most studies in the field of synchronous Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) deal with interactions between language learners, while interactions between native speakers (NS) and learners have not been explored to the same extent, particularly to ascertain whether chatting with NS can provide a pedagogically sound bridge to conversation. Through…

This article presents the results of a longitudinal study on the perceptions of a Web-enhanced learning environment by a group of beginning-level students of Italian. A Website was specially designed and implemented as a complement to the existing syllabus, in order to enhance interactivity, variety, and authenticity of materials and tasks, as…

Although the Italian system of address pronouns is relatively complex, scant attention is paid to the issue in L2 manuals designed for English-speaking learners of Italian. After showing that Italian L2 manuals are not necessarily accurate in the limited detail they provide, we examine specifically the frequent claim that so-called informal "tu"…

The use of BE as an auxiliary verb with intransitive verbs has declined in all the Romance languages over the past five centuries. Today, Spanish and Portuguese use only HAVE, in Catalan and Romanian BE occurs in marginal contexts, and in French, BE is used with approximately 40 verbs. Italian is a notable exception, since BE is still used as the…

Discusses analytical challenges of multimodal texts as they contribute to production of racial anxiety about asylum seekers. Building on a recent article that discussed the lexical manifestations of increasing racial hatred towards refugees, focuses on the children overboard affair in Australian news. (Author/VWL)

Investigates three important issues in kanji learning strategies; namely, strategy use, effectiveness of strategy and orthographic background. A questionnaire on kanji learning strategy use and perceived effectiveness was administered to beginner level, undergraduate students of Japanese from alphabetic and character backgrounds in Australia.…

Reports research that aimed to identify the foreign language and cross-cultural skill needs of workers in the tourism and hospitality industry in Australia and to develop foreign language competencies for use in industry training packages. Provides evidence for the need for foreign language skills in the industry and gives an account of the…