new book from Benjamins

[Mary Bucholtz]

John Benjamins Publishing would like to call your attention to the
following new title in the field of Discourse Linguistics:

COHERENCE IN SPOKEN AND WRITTEN DISCOURSE:
How to create it and how to describe it.
Selected papers from the International Workshop on Coherence, Augsburg,
24-27 April 1997.
Wolfram BUBLITZ, Uta LENK and Eija VENTOLA (eds.)
1999 XIV, 298 pp., Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 63
US/Canada: Cloth: 1 55619 941 4 Price: USD 79.00
Rest of World: Cloth: 90 272 5077 4 Price: NLG 158.00

Until very recently, coherence (unlike cohesion) was widely held to be a
'rather mystical notion'. However, taking account of new trends
representing a considerable shift in orientation, this volume aims at
helping relieve coherence of its mystifying aura. The general bibliography
which concludes the book bears witness to this intriguing development and
the rapidly changing scene in coherence research. Preceding this
comprehensive up-to-date Bibliography on Coherence are 13 selected papers
from the 1997 International Workshop on Coherence at the University of
Augsburg, Germany. They share a number of theoretical and methodoligical
assumptions and reflect a trend in text and discourse analysis to move away
from reducing coherence to a product of (formally represented) cohesion
and/or (semantically established) connectivity. Instead, they start from a
user- and context-oriented interpretive understanding and rely on authentic
data throughout in relating micro-linguistic to macro-linguistic issues.
The first group of papers looks at the (re-)creation of coherence in, inter
alia, reported speech, casual conversation, argumentative writing, news
reports and conference contributions. The second group describes the
negotation of coherence in oral examinations, text summaries and other
situations that require special efforts on the part of the recipient to
overcome misunderstandings and other disturbances. The third group
discusses theoretical approaches to the description of coherence.
Contributions by: Carla Bazzanella & Rossana Damiano; Wolfram Bublitz & Uta
Lenk; Anna Ciliberti; Elisabeth Couper-Kuhlen; Willis Edmondson; Gerd
Fritz; Ronald
Geluykens; Helga Kotthoff; Gunter Lorenz; Jan-Ola Östman; Ted Sanders &
Wilbert Spooren; Barbara Seidlhofer & Henry Widdowson; Eija Ventola.

NEGOTIATED INTERACTION IN TARGET LANGUAGE CLASSROOM DISCOURSE.
Jamilia BOULIMA
1999  xiv, 338 pp. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 51
US/Canada: Cloth: 1 55619 813 2 Price: USD 79.00
Rest of the World: Cloth: 90 272 5064 2 Price: NLG 158.00

This book addresses some of the most fundamental questions that can be
asked about target language (TL) acquisition in the classroom context, namely:
1. What is negotiated interaction?
2. What are the main discourse functions of negotiated interaction?
3. How frequent is negotiated interaction in TL classrooms, and does this
frequency vary by proficiency level?
4. To what extent does the initiation of negotiation overlap with the
negotiation of power in such a setting of unequal-power discourse as the TL
classroom?
The negotiation process allows TL learners to obtain 'comprehensible
input', to receive 'negative

input', and to produce 'comprehensible output'. Since these are key
variables in the acquisition
process, by researching the negotiation work occurring in TL classroom
discourse, the book fully contributes to the understanding of the process
of interlanguage development in TL classrooms and thereby has major
implications for TL teaching and teacher training. The book also
contributes to further the understanding of negotiated interaction from a
sociolinguistic standpoint: the asymmetrical nature of negotiation work in
TL classrooms reflects the role and power relationships, the social
organization, as well as the tacit interactional and cultural rules that
seem to be at work in the TL classroom context.

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