Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 22, Issue 2, 1999

Over the last ten years, evidence of gender difference in the use of language has been re-examined from a social constructionist perspective. This approach emphasises the extent to which we actively “perform” or construct aspects of our social identity in interaction with others. Drawing on an extensive database of workplace interactions recorded in a wide range of New Zealand workplaces, this paper uses a social constructionist framework to examine the strategies used by women managers to perform their professional identities at work. The analysis examines the ways in which these women draw on a range of discourse strategies to effectively manage meetings and achieve their workplace objectives.

Analysis of a series of seminars given by CSIRO computer scientists indicates that the use of the discourse marker: okay, is not random; rather, it plays an important role in orienting the listener to the overall structure of the seminar. This paper shows how okay occurs in specific environments, with specific prosodic features, and how its role and function vary according to where it occurs within the talk. Okay occurs most frequently at the boundary of one section of talk and the next, although its function varies according to whether it is associated with the beginning or with the end of a section of talk. This paper highlights the close interaction between talk and action, with special emphasis on the precise way in which saying okay is co-ordinated with placing the overhead slide on the screen.

This paper gives a preliminary insight into Hispanic medical discourse. It explores how a physician exercises power and simpatía in conversations with patients and it includes patients’ perception about good medical practice.

The focus is on the analysis of a conversation tape-recorded between the most popular and likeable doctor in the clinic and a female patient. This interaction is compared with the results obtained from a semi-structured interview aiming to discover if this medical exchange represents what patients have identified as positive medical behaviour.

The Hispanic data demonstrate that the doctor uses a variety of strategies in the exchange in order to show both his medical knowledge and his linguistic competence in expressing simpatía in discourse. The latter helps to create a pleasant atmosphere in an interaction in which the doctor’s use of the language is paramount.

According to recent survey evidence, Indigenous students, at least in schools where their numbers are significant, have not, in general, been meeting the performance standards in literacy which have been set for Australian students in Years 3 and 5. Among factors to which this is attributed are language background, absenteeism, lack of reading outside school and irregular completion of homework.

The above factors all relate the students’ lack of success to the practices of the student rather than to those of the school. This paper is concerned with one sociolinguistic factor related to school practice which, it is argued, is equally relevant, especially for students who speak Aboriginal English. The paper provides evidence that monodialectal education in standard English builds on an existing opposition whereby Aboriginal English is associated with cultural congruence and standard English with cultural imposition, making it difficult for most Aboriginal students to embrace literacy on the terms in which it is offered to them.

The principle of inclusivity is already explicit (but not fully developed) in recent curriculum framework documents. It is shown how a bidialectal approach to the teaching of Indigenous students can advance inclusivity with respect to knowledge base, linguistic skill and social empowerment for these students, and therefore remove an important barrier to their achievement of literacy.

This study investigates how first-year post-secondary students conceptualise and judge their strategic behaviour in relation to reading foreign language literary texts. The questionnaire used to collect data is structured around four important metacognitive aspects of reading: what readers believe they are able to do (Confidence), how readers conceive efficient reading in a foreign language (Effectiveness) and what readers believe makes reading difficult (Difficulty), as well as how readers believe they are able to overcome reading difficulties (Repair). In addition to providing information on conceptualisations of key areas of reading, a contrastive investigation of self-assessed proficient readers and self-assessed less proficient readers is carried out in order to elicit possible differences between the two groups.

The results obtained show that the large majority of the surveyed students are able to envision reading as a cohesive and constructive activity. Most of them report they are able to incorporate bottom-up and top-down strategic behaviour in their conceptions of foreign language reading. However, students appear to be mostly concerned with lexical difficulties which are naturally perceived by them as the major impediment to reading comprehension. As for possible conceptual differences between self-assessed proficient and less proficient students, results suggest that they are minimal. In fact, the only area where a significant discrepancy between the two groups appears is confidence.

This study examined and compared the rhetorical structure of argumentative texts written by three groups of university students: 1° twenty Indonesian texts written by Indonesian native speakers (I.I); 2° ten English texts written by Indonesian native speakers (I.E); and 3° ten English texts written by English native speakers (A.E). Following the argumentative text analysis model developed by Tirkkonen-Condit (1984 and 1986) and Connor (1990), the data were analysed using top-down and bottom-up analysis techniques at macro organisational text level. The results indicated that the text organisational structures of argumentative texts in English and in Indonesian were different in respect of the frequency of occurrence of sections—introduction, evaluation and conclusion— and of the sub-sections of refutation, sub-claim, and induction within the problem section. Cultural differences between English and Indone-sian may have played a crucial role in the text rhetorical differences. Also, the I.E. text features are more similar to those of the A.E. texts than to those of the I.I. texts. The study indicates that the Indonesian students need to study the conventions of rhetorical structures and text features of English argumentative texts in order to be able to write good argumentative texts in English.

A number of researchers (Meyer 1975, 1977a, 1977b; Meyer, Brandt & Bluth 1980; Meyer & Freedle 1984; Carrell 1983; Connor 1984) have claimed that Collection is one of the most rudimentary of expository text configurations. They suggest that, unlike expository configurations such as Comparison, Causation and Problem/Solution, it possesses no top-level structure at all. In this paper, I will re-examine the structure of one type of Collection by building on a set of claims by Tadros (1994) which suggest, contra Meyer and others, a clear basic rhetorical make-up for Collection. I will closely examine a type of Collection referred to by Tadros as Enumeration, to argue that it possesses a well-defined constituent structure and set of interconstituent relationships. I will then analyse randomly selected samples from a body of twenty essays by Cantonese-speaking freshmen enrolled in the English department of a Hong Kong university, to support two claims: 1° the majority of these learners have considerable difficulty conforming to the interconstituent constraints on Enumeration; 2° as a group they show evidence of three developmentally differentiable levels of acquisition of the rhetorical structure of Enumeration. In a final section, I will consider the pedagogical implications of these findings.

In this study the use of "well" as a discourse marker is analysed in sixteen episodes of a television series and in two English language textbooks to illustrate what communicative language teaching can get from work on discourse analysis. Results of the analysis show that the meaning of well as a mainly interactive device signalling acceptance due to modification is present both in television series and in textbooks. However, the analysis also shows an absence of inductive and language awareness approaches to focus learners’ attention on the interactive features of “well” as a discourse marker. Further research is needed in different languages to understand the meaning and use of discourse markers and the implications of these analyses for language teaching.