Within SFL and other approaches to early child language, the predominant emphasis with respect to 'interpersonal' meaning has up till now been with the infant's proto-'speech acts' and their development into conversational exchange. This article argues for broadening our consideration of the interpersonal in language development to include the emergence of evaluative and attitudinal language. To do this, naturalistic case study data from children aged between nine months and four years is examined, using Martin's (2000) appraisal analysis as an informing theoretical framework. It is argued that language itself should be recognized as founded upon affectual beginnings and that the earliest 'protolanguage' phase can be construed as a system of semioticized affect. Following from this, the article tracks the development of two children's resources for expressing emotional, moral and other evaluations, examines the interplay of implicit (evoked) and explicit (inscribed) attitudinal construals in mother-child talk, and explores the role of ATTITUDE 1 in language development generally. With respect to the latter, it is argued that apparently impersonal areas such as causal relations and generalizations arise initially from the impetus to share 'attitude'. The enterprise of construing experience in the evaluative terms relevant to the meaning group is thus central to the child's endeavor of learning the mother tongue.

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Argumentation can be defined at different levels and serve different purposes but its role in knowledge understanding and construction has given it a central place in education, particularly at tertiary level. The advent of computer-supported text based conferences has created new sites where such educational dialogues can take place, but the quality of the interaction and whether it is serving its educational purpose is still uncertain. This paper reports on a framework of analysis that has been developed to illuminate the arguing process within an asynchronous electronic conferencing environment, showing how it is both similar to, and different from, argumentation in the more traditional forums of multi-party, face-to-face discussion and traditional written essays. The framework develops earlier work by the authors and is applied to two electronic conferences within the same postgraduate course, comparing overall patterns of argumentation. Findings are presented on the extent to which the technology of electronic conferencing shapes and supports students' participation in academic literacy practices relating to argumentation, proposing, at the same time, that the teaching strategy adopted by the lecturer is also an important variable.

This paper describes a qualitative study of asynchronous electronic conferencing by 3 tutorial groups on the same postgraduate course (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages Worldwide), forming part of a distance MA in Applied Linguistics at the Open University, U.K. The groups varied in the degree to which the tutor participated in the discussion and in whether the tutor's input took the form of responding to student posts or the setting of tasks to scaffold the learners' development of academic skills. It is argued that the least interventionist strategy in terms of tutor response and task-setting resulted in the least productive conference discussion in terms of communicative interaction and academic development, while a more interventionist role by the tutor depended for its success on characteristics of the tutor input and the task set.