A funny thing happened on the way to the forum: Electronic discussion and foreign language learning

Amongst the opportunities for cross-cultural contact created by the burgeoning use of the Internet are those provided by electronic discussion lists. This study looks at what happens when language students venture out of the classroom (virtual or otherwise) to participate in on-line discussion groups with native speakers. Responses to messages and commentary by moderators and other participants on the (in) appropriateness of contributions allow us to determine what constitutes successful participation and to make suggestions regarding effective teaching strategies for this medium. A case study examines the threads started by four anglophone students of French when they post messages to a forum on the Web site of the French newspaper Le Monde. Investigation of these examples points to the ways in which electronic discussion inflects and is inflected by cultural and generic expectations. We suggest that successful participation on Internet fora depends on awareness of such cultural and generic mores and an ability to work within and/or with them. Teachers therefore need to find ways in which students can be sensitized to such issues so that their participation in such electronic discussion is no longer seen as linguistic training, but as engagement with a cultural practice.

Multilingualism and local-global identities: Japanese language education in rural Australia

The purpose of this article is to examine the value accruing to a regional area in Australia from the location of an undergraduate Japanese language education program in a university in that area. The focus is on the manner in which the inclusion of such a program enhances the sustainability of the area. Sustainability is here defined as the resilience demonstrated by social subjects in the absence of the full range of services available in more densely populated and resource advantaged areas. Such resilience implies an ongoing capacity on the part of subjects to contribute productively to social and economic networks in the area. The discussion includes two cases of graduates of the program under review. On the basis of these cases, the argument is advanced that local regional and rural area access to a tertiary sector second language program offers a unique and valuable strategic dimension to the personal and professional development of social agents in regional areas and to the sustainability of these areas generally.

Can and may: Monosemy or polysemy?

This paper argues, on the basis of a corpus-based study of the meanings of can and may in contemporary British, American and Australian English, that a polysemy-based analysis is applicable to both modals. With may, epistemic possibility is the dominant meaning, but the dynamic and deontic possibility meanings still account for over 16.5% of tokens. By contrast the meanings of can, apart from a small percentage (1.1%) of epistemic cases, are united through the concept of potentiality. Nevertheless there are signs that the epistemic possibility meaning is becoming established, as it sheds its syntactic/semantic restriction to non-affirmative contexts.

Australian political discourse: Pronominal choice in campaign speeches

The intention behind language used by candidates during an election campaign is to persuade voters to vote for a particular political party. Fundamental to the political arena is construction of identity, group membership and ways of talking about self, others, and the polarizing categories of 'us' and 'them'. This paper will investigate the pragmatics of pronominal choice and the way in which politicians construct and convey their own identities and those of their political opponents within political speeches. Taking six speeches by John Howard and Mark Latham across the course of the 2004 federal election campaign, I look at the ways in which pronominal choice indicates a shifting scope of reference to creat pragmatic effects and serve political functions.

A cross-linguistic comparison of address pronoun use in four European languages: Intralingual and interlingual dimensions

As part of a major ongoing project, we consider and compare contemporary patterns of address pronoun use in four major European languages- French, German, Italian and Swedish. We are specifically interested in two major aspects: intralingual behaviour, that is, within the same language community, and interlingual dimensions of address pronoun use. With respect to the former, we summarize our key findings to date. We then give consideration in a more preliminary fashion to issues and evidence relevant to the latter.