Received: 7 June 2005 Revised: 9 December 2005 Accepted: 3 January 2006 Abstract In many types of activities, communicative and material activities are so intertwined that the one cannot be understood without taking the other into account. This is true of maritime and hospital work that are used as examples in the paper. The spatial context of the activity is also important: what you can do dep...

Within the IS-field the notion of a speech act has been used as a point of departure by many scholars in the analysis of computer-mediated communication. This pragmatic concept has turned out to be very useful in the development of the field. However, the notion of speech acts is too restricted for continued exploration of the full potential of the pragmatic web. In this paper we examine some p...

There is a limited literature on pre-school children‘s experiences with digital technologies at home and little discussion of the ways in which children harness these technologies for their own purposes. This paper discusses findings drawn from three studies which investigated the role of domestic technologies and digital toys and games in young children‘s lives. Specifically, it focuses on chi...

This article is a comparison of the Natural Approach and Communicative Language Teaching. Using the Richards and Rodgers’ model for conceptualizing approaches and methods described in Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching, 1986, Cambridge University Press, I compare and contrast these two approaches carefully at the level of approach, design and procedure. At the level of approach, I look...

This article focuses on an aspect of traditional instruction — the form-only activities commonly called "drills," "mechanical practice," or "pattern practice." The authors first distinguish language as an internalized system from language as a productive skill and review the nature of mechanical pratice. They contend that despite claims made about communicative language teaching and its goals, ...

BEHAVIOR functions according to the principles of homeostasis and may therefore be called regulatory. The term "maintenance beh'avior" is used here to describe activities that help regulate the physiological state of the organism. When given in the presence of another organism, certain maintenance activities may have secondary, communicative effects through "sympathetic induction" causing socia...