The Parent Education Profile (PEP) is an instrument used by family literacy programs to rate parents' support for children's literacy development. This article uses Critical Discourse Analysis to examine how the PEP constructs the ideal parent, the text's underlying assumptions about parenting and education, and its ideological effects. The…

Comparison of the narratives of 16 children with word-finding problems and 16 normal children (grades 1-6) found that children with word-finding disorders did not differ in language productivity but manifested significantly more word-finding characteristics in their narratives. Implications for assessment and intervention are discussed. (Author/DB)

Describes four procedures commonly used to describe the content and structure of text: T-unit analysis, propositional representation, story grammars, and primary trait scoring. Discusses results of research regarding the procedures and their implications for instruction. (TJ)

This paper provides information concerning preschool narrative development in typically developing North American children, stressing previously documented links between early narrative skills and literacy development. Methods are provided for assessing narrative skills of language-impaired children. The methods involve eliciting from the children…

Presents an experimental primary trait rubric designed to assess a writer's support for an argument, and structured as an eleven-cell grid on which a rater can plot a student's score. Describes the grid, and its use in a study of 1,892 eleventh-grade essays. Also describes ways to use the grid to teach invention and arrangement. (JG)

Papers by teachers and teacher trainers address issues in bilingualism and related teaching techniques in the elementary school classroom in England. They are derived from an inservice teacher training project. Essays include: "Investigating Children's Discourse in the Primary Classroom: The Linguistic Demands of Classroom Tasks"…