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It is widely recognized that there is a relationship between vocabulary development and children's reading ability. This article will focus on the strategies employed by 24 adults (12 mothers and 12 qualified preschool teachers) when introducing new and unusual vocabulary to four-year-old children during shared reading. The mothers differed in terms of educational achievement; half the mothers had left school by the age of 16, and half the mothers were tertiary educated. All the adult–child dyads read the same two picture books (one narrative and one informational) and the surrounding talk was analysed to determine what kinds of supportive strategies were used by the adults to introduce and explain unfamiliar vocabulary items. There were differences between the two groups of mothers in terms of the frequency and manner in which technical vocabulary was introduced and defined. The preschool teachers differed from both types of mothers. The implications of these findings for young children's emergent literacy are discussed.

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This paper presents a linguistic perspective on changes in news writing in the context of Australian wartime journalism over a century. It forms part of a larger study that takes reports of the conclusion of war from the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) as a set of texts of the same register, through which to investigate change in the meanings and context of news reporting. Reports of the ends of seven wars (or the end of a phase of war) in which Australia has been involved from 1902 to 2003 were analysed linguistically using the framework of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) (see e.g. Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004). In SFL, the configuration of conditions that motivate a writer’s selection of meanings ? the context of situation ? is viewed as a set of parameters: field (the kind of social interaction that is taking place), tenor (the relationship of the participants in the interaction) and mode (what part the language is playing in the interaction) (Halliday and Hasan, 1985). This paper focuses on the parameter of tenor, particularly social distance and the ‘textual visibility’ of the journalist, by exploring some lexicogrammatical realizations of semantic motifs. These motifs are: the textual identification of the journalist or agencies (realized by bylines), mediation of news information (realized by projection and the thematic status of projected information), semantic intervention in the news process (realized by tense selections that bring all news information in line with the journalist’s frame of temporal reference), and codal sharing (realized by homophoric and deictic reference).

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