This article describes some of the characteristics of questions as they uniquely operate in the ethnographic interview setting. The discussion centers on the dual nature of questions and on their formulation, with specific attention paid to issues of assumptions, categories, and scope. The insights presented on ethnographic questioning in general are then applied to the elicitation of information from child informants.

Recent research into the processes of children's first and second language development has yielded a number of insights which have been combined to create the communicative language teaching model. This model should be useful to English as a second language (ESL) teachers, both in planning their own instruction and in advising the increasing numbers of regular classroom teachers with limited English-speaking (LES) students in their classes. This article summarizes the central assumptions of the communicative language teaching model and specifies the potential difficulties that regular classroom teachers may face in adopting it. It then presents seven criteria to be used in organizing communicative classrooms and describes specific applications of these criteria to decisions about organizing classroom interaction and the physical environment.

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The TESOL Quarterly invites readers to submit short reports and updates on their work. These summaries may address any areas of interest to Quarterly readers. Authors' addresses are printed with these reports to enable interested readers to contact the authors for more details.

A sociolinguistic analysis of language use among preschool chil dren in a bilingual English/Hebrew bilingual classroom was con ducted to examine the effects of teacher background (U.S. or Israeli born/educated) while interacting with children from bilingual or monolingual backgrounds and teacher's participation (presence or absence) in classroom context. The results suggest that the bilingual (Israeli) teacher had a different interactive style than the American teacher. Children interacted differentially with each teacher and, as a result, varied both their speech and their involvement. The children's backgrounds also influence their language use patterns in the small peer group interaction context with the teacher absent. BACKGROUND