Text in Education and Society

The following sections are included:

• Contents

• Contributors

• Editorial Introduction

The following sections are included:

• Introduction

• Writing, Reference and Representation: A Case Study
  • Draft 1
  • Draft 2

• Writing Drafts: A Linguistic Commentary

• Writing Drafts: Re-writing, Revising and Reformulating Knowledge

• Language as Form: Language as Choice

• Language as Discourse

• Language, Discourse and Literature

• Critical Language Awareness: Critical Reflection

• Re-writing and Pedagogy

• Re-writing Texts, Reconstructing the World

• Conclusion

• References

• Appendix 1: Re-wordings, Re-writings, Re-visions

The Department of English Language and Literature of the National University of Singapore is at present undertaking a project on classroom interaction in primary and early secondary schooling. The rationale for the project is to look at pedagogic discourse, oral and written and see how educational knowledge is being constructed. The reason for this is that language is seen as the primary tool for developing pupil ability to move from the world of commonsense knowledge, everyday language, to the kinds of technical and academic discourse required by the school curriculum. Pupils have to be apprenticed into the kind of writing valued by the educational community, that is, pupils must be made aware of the linguistic requirements of the reading and writing tasks asked of them and at the same time given the tools with which to complete them…

The following sections are included:

• The Loom – Theoretical Framework for Studying Adolescent Girls’ Writing

• Research Questions

• In Pursuit of Understanding: Methodology

• Data Collection/Data Analysis

• Selection of Subjects

• Interviews

• The Texts of the Subjects

• Semiotic Analysis

• Positioning the Researcher

• The Results - A Synopsis Creative Writing
  • Its Location
  • The Class
  • The Girls and Their Writing
  • Implications and Discussion

• References

The following sections are included:

• Introduction

• Unpacking “Spoken Text”

• Roles of Talk in Learning

• Studying Learner Talk: A Case Study
  • Background to the study
  • Aim, Method and Focus of Present Study
  • Findings and Discussion

• Conclusion

• References

• Appendix: extracts from transcripts

The following sections are included:

• Introduction

• Repetition as a Linguistic Phenomenon
  • Fossilised v. Instantial
  • Identical v Extended
  • Self-repetition vs. Allo-repetition
  • Immediate v. Delayed Repetition
  • ‘Conscious’ v. ‘Unconscious’ Repetition

• Repetition in L2 Learning/Teaching

• Some Practical Applications

• Conclusion

• References

• Appendix A

• Appendix B

The following sections are included:

• Introduction

• From Grammar to Communication and Back?

• Theoretical Basis for the Communicative Approach
  • Key Assumptions of Functionalism
  • Varieties of Functionalism
  • Functionalism as the Basis for the Communicative Approach
  • Theory or Bust?

• Linguistic Theory and Language Education
  • Can Current Linguistic Theory Support Language Education?
  • Functionalism and Language Education

• Communicative Competence Revisited

• The Need for Descriptive Grammar in Language Education

• Concluding Remarks

• References

The following sections are included:

• Introduction
  • Metacognition
  • Metalinguistic Awareness

• References

In this paper, I consider the research methodology of studies that aim to tell us what second language (L2) listeners do as they unpack the text of lectures. I will review research studies that attempted to collect datain controlled conditions and will consider whether the lecture experience in such studies matches the way that students experience authentic lectures. From the review, it will be apparent that many of the earlier studies on L2 lecture comprehension were of dubious validity. I will then go on to describe three studies featuring L2 lecture comprehension (Flowerdew and Tauroza 1995; Tauroza, in preparation; and Tauroza and Allison 1994). Thesestudies illustrate recent advances in L2 lecture comprehension research and show that data can be collected in conditions that are both controlled and extremely naturalistic. Taken together, the investigations provide a case study of the evolution of research methodology in L2 lecture comprehension…

The following sections are included:

• Language and Knowledge

• Linguistic Data for Teachers: The Corpus and Intuition

• Packing and Unpacking

• Less and Fewer

• Conclusion

• References

The following sections are included:

• I

• II

• III

• IV

• V

• VI

• VII

• References

The following sections are included:

• Introduction

• Data and Methods

• A Multidisciplinary Approach to Judicial Discourse: The Language of Bradwell, Reed, and J.E.B.

• Concluding Remarks

• References

• Appendix
  • Text 1: Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 130 (1873)
  • Text 2: Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S. 71 (1971)
  • Text 3: J.E.B. v. Alabama Ex Rel. T.B., 114 S.Ct. 1419 (1994)

The following sections are included:

• Introduction

• Language, Discourse and Text

• The Singapore Experience
  • Socio-historical Analysis
  • The Speak Mandarin Campaign
  • Discursive Analysis
  • Dialogic Analysis

• Conclusion

• References

• Appendix Mandarin Is More than a Language
  • Heterogeneous Community
  • Language and Values
  • A Sense of History
  • Making Mandarin Popular

This paper is based on a particular view about the relationship between language, thought and culture which I have termed “grounding“ (Ho 1992, 1996; related ideas can be found in the works of Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Fowler 1985, Pawley 1986, Grace 1987, and Wierzbicka 1991, 1992). The use of a language in a culture involves essentially the grounding of expressions conceptually and experientially in the culture. What this means is that recurrent shared experiences in a community generally give rise to conventional ways of conceptualising them, and consequently, conventional ways of expressing these conventionalised conceptions. The resultingexpressions, in turn, give significance to the experiences from which theyarise through the conceptions that they embody. Grounding thus situates the familiar metaphor that language is a mirror of culture by formulating how language use reflects the ways in which its users conceptualise and experience things in their social and cultural environment…

Let me begin with a parody of a graduate course description: CourseCode: Eng ??? Course Title: How to begin? Or refrain from beginning? Or to avoid having always-already-begun? Or would that be ahistorical?: The crisis of self-reflexiveness in current curriculum design…

Pakistan was only a few years old when its central government was challenged by ethnicity – Bengali ethnicity expressed through the Bengali Language Movement (or Bhasha Ondolan) of 1948 and 1952. How could this have happened? After all Bengal had enthusiastically supported the idea of Pakistan before the partition. The Muslims of Bengal had called themselvesMuslims first but now they insisted upon their Bengali identity. The West Pakistani press, official figures and politicians declared that Hindus andcommunists had created the language movement; that it was a conspiracy to break up Pakistan. But such an explanation can hardly satisfy any student of recent history. After all ethnicity has not vanished, as liberals fondly imagined, with the coming of modernity (Glazer and Moynihan 1975:5). Indeed, it is considered a major contemporary phenomenon and one which has the potential to make the world a polarised and insecure place…

The following sections are included:

• Introduction

• A Taxonomy of the Approaches

• The Mind-Mind Problem

• The Generative Approach to Language and Mind

• Towards a Phenomenological View of the Linguistic System

• Concluding Discussion

• References

The following sections are included:

• Introduction

• A Nativised Text Example

• The Nativised Dictionary

• English Use in Singapore and Malaysia from a Lexical Perspective
  • Group A: Core English
  • Group B: SME/English words/Formal
  • Group C: SME/Non-English words/Formal
  • Group D: SME/English words/Informal
  • Group E: SME/Non-English words/Informal

• Conclusion

• References

• Appendix: The Straits Times Text (4 September 1996)