Strategies for gathering narratives from children are described. Two analysis approaches (narrative level and story grammar) are recommended for discriminating between the narratives of normal and handicapped students at various ages. (Author/DB)

A collection of three papers written at a workshop on discourse grammar in Philippine languages is presented. The aims of the workshop were to (1) focus on discourse level grammar in the languages studied; (2) identify contrastive discourse types (genre) in the surface grammar; (3) identify the semantic constructions encoded by the different…

A story format and discourse analysis procedure was used to evaluate the spoken language skills of 20 elementary students with learning disabilities over a 1-year period. Stories from memory were longer and characterized by more as well as different types of errors than were stories from pictures or stories based on games. (Author/DB)

To examine the relationship between writers' knowledge of expository frames--conventions accepted by both writers and readers in association with a particular type of discourse--and writing skill, 60 persuasive essays were analyzed for content organization. The essays, evaluated as either above average or average on a high school writing…

Six papers resulting from the fieldwork projects of members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics program at the University of North Dakota include: "A Relational Grammar Approach to Kera Syntax" (Janet K. Camburn), a syntactic study of an Afroasiatic language; "Clitic Doubling and M-Chains in Piraha" (Dan Everett), examining…

A 2-year study of optimal structures for multimedia instruction is being conducted to provide experimentally validated guidelines for the design of computer-based instruction generation systems and for human instruction in a multimedia setting. In order to obtain for analysis a significant range of the possible discourse structures that occur in…

This collection of conference papers includes: "When Does Teacher Talk Work as Input?"; "Cultural Input in Second Language Learning"; "Skilled Variation in a Kindergarten Teacher's Use of Foreigner Talk"; "Teacher-Pupil Interaction in Second Language Development"; "Foreigner Talk in the University…