Issues in Applied Linguistics

This study presents the policy of Arabization in Tunisia as an example of language planning which has been used to pursue and maintain power. It argues that Arabization has been promoted only to the extent that it served the interests of the politico-economic ruling elite. After reviewing the relevant literature, the study evaluates the language situation in Tunisia in terms of the degree of implementation of Arabization in three domains: 1) education; 2) government administration; 3) the media and general use. The study shows that the official authorities have been quite inconsistent in promoting Arabization, and that they have encouraged bilingualism (Arabic and French) and biculturalism (Arab-Islamic and Western European, mainly French) much more consistently. In this light, the study analyzes the attitudes and objectives of the authorities, who represent the influential elites, as they interact with other competing elites in order to maintain power.

The Hawaii State Test of Essential Competencies (HSTEC) is a minimal competency test which students must pass to graduate from high school. This paper focuses on differences in HSTEC (Form G) performance between 300 ninth grade students of limited English proficiency (SLEP) and the 318 ninth grade students used in the original norming sample (NORM group). The analyses indicate that SLEP students form a distinctly separate population from the NORM group (F = 206.21, p < .01) with SLEP students scoring 26.14 points lower than the NORM group on average. At the same time, those subtests which the SLEP students found to be more difficult were correspondingly difficult for the NORM group. Though there were no significant differences found among the various SLEP group ethnicities, there were significant differences among the HSTEC subtests and for interactions between ethnicity and the subtests. The results are discussed in terms of language training that some of the SLEP students should receive so that they can demonstrate their true abilities on the HSTEC.

This study in linguistic stylistics examines the coherence in Sam Shepard's play Fool for Love by focussing on the relationship of speech exchanges to frames and the relationship of frames to one another. A frame, defined as the activity that the speakers are engaged in, consists of two types: (1) single-speaker frames, which involve only one speaker and an implied or passive listener, and (2) multi-speaker frames, which involve more than one speaker. The following paper, however, will examine only multi-speaker frames.

Because frame analysis enables one to focus on units larger than those usually examined in linguistic stylistics, it can be seen to provide a clearer understanding of textual coherence in dramatic texts. Specifically, the study argues that both coherence in Shepard's play results when speech exchanges and frames are formed into patterns which the reader perceives as unified wholes, and that coherence may result when even discontinuous utterances are organized into a pattern which the reader can perceive as a unified whole. On a larger scale, it is shown that discontinous frames can themselves be arranged into a pattern which can be perceived as coherent by the reader, and that overall coherence depends not upon continuity between frames, but rather on the arrangement of discontinous or continuousframes into a coherent whole.