Past studies in language teaching have addressed the issue of whether the benefits of formal instruction outweigh those of naturalistic instruction, or vice versa.1 This study examined 1 aspect of naturalistic instruction closely: the conversation partnership. There were 3 conversation partnerships (English/Mandarin, English/Arabic, and English/Korean); each partner played the role of native speaker (NS) and nonnative speaker (NNS) of 1 language. An underlying idea of this study is that the repercussions of a relationship in which members are equal partners in language learning may extend beyond the relationship and into the community. These pairs were organized by the ESL Center at the Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS). Transcripts of 10-minute English parts of 6 conversations (2 from each partnership) were examined for uses of certain negotiation strategies, and the participants’ opinions regarding the usefulness of these strategies in learning English, Mandarin, Arabic or Korean were sought.

A pressure-induced triclinic-to-monoclinic phase transition has been caught `in the act over a wider series of high-pressure synchrotron diffraction experiments conducted on a large, photoluminescent organo-gold(I) compound. Here, we describe the mechanism of this single-crystal-to-single-crystal phase transition, the onset of which occurs at ∼0.6 GPa, and we report a high-quality structure of the new monoclinic phase, refined using aspherical atomic scattering factors. Our case illustrates how conducting a fast series of diffraction experiments, enabled by modern equipment at synchrotron facilities, can lead to overestimation of the actual pressure of a phase transition due to slow transformation kinetics.