Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 18, Issue 2, 1995

This paper examines a few techniques of sexist role reinforcement in the British newspapers The Sun and The Daily Mirror and the Malaysian newspapers The Star and The New Straits Times. Beginning with a discussion of stereotyping and the conservative male- dominated ideology prevalent in the British press, it goes on to cite linguistic items and female/male ratios that expose this ideology. Features we look at include modification, relexicalisation and reductive language, as well as puns, alliteration and the classification of women as either pin-up commodities or annexes of the males to whom they ‘belong’. Sexist language in the Malaysian press being much less explicit, many of these categories are not present when it comes to The Star and The New Straits Times. In a more limited study of these papers, we nevertheless find an even greater bias towards males as the makers of news. It is suggested that teachers refrain from using sexist materials in class unless it is to discuss their ideology explicitly.

The following study was undertaken to further understand the effect of content knowledge on learners’ participation in interactions between non-native speakers. 120 male students, all of them Spanish, were paired to form 20 dyads whose members had equal content knowledge, but different levels in oral proficiency, 20 dyads in which fluent learners were relative content experts, and 20 dyads in which learners with limited oral skills were the experts. Measures of conversational participation included: amount of talk, conversational fillers, back channels, topic moves, clarification questions, confirmation checks, and comprehension checks. x 2 analysis of results indicated that, regardless of learners’ level of proficiency, relative content knowledge can explain different conversational patterns of participation: the relative expert producing more output (number of words), while the relative nonexpert works hard to understand the message. Findings of the study support the relationship between content knowledge and conversational participation in the context of non-native interaction.

This paper on Spanish for Science and Technology (SST) analyzes the rhetorical functions carried out by the selection of voice — active, passive or se-passive — in five biological research articles in Spanish. It compares these rhetorical functions with those found in French and English scientific papers. Finally it suggests that there may be some universals which can be established on the basis of this comparison, but only through the introduction of an intermediate level of “discourse function” between the levels of rhetorical function and the level of grammatical form.

The acquisition of complex grammatical structures of a non-cognate language has been reported to be a daunting task for adult learners (Samimy and Tabuse, 1992; Bailey, 1983; Kleimann, 1977). In the case of Arabic morphology, this task is reported to be difficult not only for foreign learners (Bakalla, 1980; Neel, 1980) but also for native speakers (Omar, 1973). The current paper sets out to investigate the nature and the processes involved in the learning of Arabic subject-verb agreement structures by Australian advanced learners. The investigation employs explanations from second language acquisition (SLA) theories as well as from linguistic theories. It is hypothesised that (1) the amount and direction of information encoding (Person, Number and Gender) motivated by certain semantic categories and word order, as well as (2) the availability of discourse cues would influence the learners’ performance in subject-verb agreement tasks. The results reported in this paper indicate that these two factors are significantly important in predicting and accounting for the learners’ final linguistic achievement in this grammatical structure.

Argument is a structured phenomenon, the structuring of which is evident in conversational activity. This study begins with speech act analyses of argumentation and examines the was in which idealized models of argumentation relate to the linguistic behaviour of participants in argument as talk. While a speech act understanding of arguments reveals some of the basic principles of the ways in which arguments are constructed as talk, sequencing patterns of arguments are interactionally accomplished. Speakers produce turns which are related to their purpose in talking and which include speech act complexes appropriate for the perlocutionary act of convincing. This limits the range of choices for a speaker in the sequence of interaction. Turns which do not count as appropriate for the task of arguing are accountable.

This paper discusses the maintenance of Chinese in Australia. It presents the case for the high probability of the maintenance of Cantonese and Modern Standard Chinese (MSC). Some of the factors favourable to the maintenance of Cantonese and MSC include the following: relative numerical strength of the speakers; cultural dissimilarity between the dominant and the minority groups; language as a core value in the minority group; concentration of the minority groups at focal points; interaction patterns of the minority group and change in Australian language policies. These factors are examined in the light of supportive language maintenance institutions that reinforce the high probability of the maintenance of Cantonese and MSC.

In recent years there has been an increase in interest in the analysis of economics discourse by both applied linguists and economists. This paper briefly discusses some of the main protagonists in the debate between economists about their own discourse, and brings together and reviews the significant studies by applied linguists in this area. It suggests that the studies by applied linguists may be grouped according to the categories Micro-studies, Macro-studies, and Educational Studies, and indicates areas of developing interest. It also suggests the need to account for other aspects of economics discourse, areas which seem to be largely ignored in the literature. This paper is of interest to those attempting to analyse economics discourse or the discourse of other social science disciplines in particular, and for those who are interested in discourse analysis in general.

This paper is a sequel to the project which was reported in the article entitled ‘Through the glass darkly? The National Policy on Languages as seen by Tertiary Language Staff (Rado and Foster 1990). In that article, the main concern was with the impact the National Policy may have had on the design of tertiary LOTE courses. This article looks at further developments in selected tertiary LOTE contexts up to July 1994. These developments have been highlighted as of interest for planning future courses.