Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 12, Issue 2, 1989

This paper reports the early stages of a longitudinal study of one child’s development of language comprehension, focussing on the period 9-14 months.

The nature of the comprehension process is discussed as are the methodological problems involved in investigating this process in pre-speech children.

The analysis of data explores the development of early word meanings, and relational meanings.

It is seen that language comprehension far outstrips production during this period. Although the child can express only a very limited range of meanings, he can understand and respond to a wide range of meanings of increasing complexity, including object and action terms, and relationships between them.

It is suggested that the rapid growth of comprehension during this period grows out of contextualized interactional routines shared between child and caretaker.

The case study reported here grew out of a study of the development of comparisons and contrasts in young children’s language (Phillips, 1988). The data source was Halliday (1984). The expansion of one child’s lexicon in one domain of special interest to him was charted from 1; 6 to 2; 6 with the aim of revealing the role played by comparing-and-contrasting as an organizing principle. The case study served to throw light on language-cognition debate.

This article deals with the methodology of Community Language Learning (C.L.L.) from a cultural and discourse perspective. It seeks to demonstrate how C.L.L. can be exploited effectively in the classroom as a means of addressing the socio-cultural dimension of language learning and teaching. The original C.L.L. model (Charles Curran’s) is examined, and a modified version described and analyzed. The central feature of counselling strategies is highlighted and illustrated, demonstrating the importance of negotiating rather than imposing meaning. The article then explores how C.L.L. is effective in reaching a number of short-term goals: e.g. text repair; learning about socio-cultural conventions and learning to use language appropriate to these conventions; exposing incidents of language failure and reasons for these. The importance of the teacher’s understanding of discourse conventions is underlined. Finally C.L.L. is reviewed in terms of both its weaknesses and strengths.

This paper is an attempt to find an answer to the question of how to design a writing course for the teaching of Business English at Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Trade (GIFT) in China. Such a question implies a critical review of the practice of Business English teaching at GIFT and of some contemporary foreign language teaching theories. It is argued that the basic criterion for a Business English course design is that the specification of the language required by the learner defines the course content, and that the categories of the business communicative function can become the framework of a writing course in business English.

The affective aspects of language learning have been the subject of much discussion in literature, both in their positive and negative manifestations.

This paper is concerned with negative affect in formal classes, upon English-speaking adults learning foreign languages in the adult education mode, as a compulsory element of a higher degree. The paper is based on diaries which students were required to keep as part of the course.2 The diaries were primarily intended to facilitate deliberate introspection and explicit consideration by the students of their own learning process and the various factors, linguistic and non-linguistic, which affected their learning.

Diary and introspective studies as a qualitative, rather than a quantitative tool for research into language learning, have been undertaken by Bailey (1983), Schumann (1977 and 1980), McDonough (1978) and Rivers (1983).

They do not however deal with the quite startling fears and anxieties manifested in our study nor with the consequences for their success or otherwise in language learning.

This paper sets out to provide details of student perceptions, especially the sometimes extreme manifestations of fear and anxiety they reveal. The authors hypothesize, on the basis of the diaries, that it is the individual’s “language boundary” or “language ego” which is severely threatened by public exposure in the foreign language classroom and which results in these manifestations of fear, anxiety and regression.

This paper reports findings from a study of clefts and pseudo-clefts in two standard corpora of English, one spoken and one written. The distributional patterns of the constructions across the various genres of the two corpora are explored, and explanations offered in terms of their distinctive communicative functions. Pseudo-clefts, which were considerably more popular in the spoken genres than in the written, attach special status to given information, presented in the form of a subordinate clause which is at the same time presupposed and, in the unmarked construction, thematic. Clefts, which were marginally more frequent in the written genres, are oriented towards newness. In both unmarked clefts and one type of marked cleft new information is highlighted via thematic predication.

This brief article critically examines the assumptions and shortcomings of lexico-syntactically based measures of readability, using the popular Fry’s readability scale as its prime example. Thereafter, it explores an alternative semantic approach to the issue by re-focusing upon three crucial cohesive factors in the development of textual meaning that Fry’s formula ignores, to its cost.