Examines what should be the oral component of a foreign language course. Structural, interactive, generic, and contextual constraints are discussed in terms of their implications for teaching. (32 references) (Author/CK)

Argues that children's literature contains strategies to confine texts within a narrow band of sociocultural values. The language of children's fiction offers conventionalized discourse by means of which content is encoded. These texts are symptomatic of how literature is complicit in the ideological construction of Australian childhood. (nine…

Presents an analysis of five first-person oral narratives of Aboriginal children of Western Australia recorded outside the classroom. These narratives are compared with a first-person oral narrative of a non-Aboriginal child and with teacher-led interactions in the classes of which the Aboriginal children are members. (26 references) (Author/CK)

Exploratory ideas about discourse analysis as a method for the collection and analysis of language attitudes are presented. The data for the investigation is a series of group negotiations among female and male speakers from Anglo-Australian and Greek-Australian backgrounds. (23 references) (VWL)

Describes typical differences in conversational routines in French and Australian English and kinds of tensions arising when speakers with two different sets of rules come into contact. Even simple questions contain a variety of assumptions ranging from whom it is suitable to ask to the kind of answer or the amount of detail that is expected. (13…

Examined spontaneous teacher/child discourse in two year-one Sydney classrooms, one where the majority of children came from non-English-speaking backgrounds and one where all children were native English speakers. Significant differences existed between the discourse in each classroom in terms of the frequency of the teacher's speech and the…

Uses the methodology of conversational analysis to examine a case of "troubles talk" between a group of female survivors of rape. The conversational process of "affiliation" between interactants as it occurs within the structure of the conversation is examined as are the successfully utilized linguistic and paralinguistic…

Using conversational analysis, an argument is made that two dimensions to talk-in-interaction can be distinguished that permit a clearer understanding of fabrication as involving questions of content or substance where the functional end is one of deception. These dimensions of fabrication are explored in a single case study. (19 references) (JL)

Replicates and examines the methodology of Pamela Fisherman's study of Brazilian Portuguese speakers, "Interactions: The Work Women Do." The present study further develops the treatment of question forms and finds that not all have a function in developing and maintaining discourse. Few similarities were found in the results of the two…

The relationship between teachers' theories of language and learning and the nature of classroom discourse is explored. Data from two classes on Aborigine lifestyles suggest that there are three components functioning in all lessons: interpersonal, content, and metalanguage. The quality of the metalanguage component influences the overall quality…

After a review of systems for analyzing classroom talk, an approach for a more refined system of classifying classroom discourse is presented based on a study of 20 final year English-as-a-Second-Language student teachers. The taxonomy of types of teacher acts may provide a diagnostic tool for teacher training. (20 references) (Author/LB)

An examination of approaches to analyzing speech reporting, found that the various approaches fall into two broad categories: traditional, emphasizing the syntactic dimension; and discourse pragmatic, emphasizing the interaction of syntactic, pragmatic, and stylistic factors. A model is proposed and applied to learner varieties of English and…

Proposes a model for creating citations in academic writing that relates variation in citation language forms to writers' ability to control how they position themselves and their texts within a multimember colloquy that comprises the past, present, and future academic community. The model is potentially valuable pedagogically and for analyzing…

Analysis of 150 years of accident news writing in the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald is presented, with the aim of uncovering the genesis of the "hard" news story and locating the practice of news writing in a historical context. Parallels are suggested between the nature of accident stories and the role and concerns of print media in…

Analysis of natural speech from 6-year-old (n=10) and 10-year-old (n=10) children suggests that, during later language development, the complexity of structures at the group/phrase level increases. There are also developments in discourse, including increased sensitivity to the role of topic-selection in developing the shape of a text, and to…