Discusses perspectives and approaches that teachers can utilize in demonstrating for students the importance and complexity of ethical decisions in the oral and written composition process. Explores the use of religious, legal, political, dialogical, situational, and human nature perspectives. (Author/GC)

Describes a story grammar, summarizes some results of story grammar research, and suggests instructional procedures for developing children's concept of story and story components. (FL)

Examines the need for the evaluation of syntactic complexity of instructional materials in order to match them to students' needs, discusses the shortcomings of traditional analysis, and provides activities that can be used to introduce syntactic structures to students. (HTH)

A method used to help translators develop skill in understanding texts uses a grid for organizing information before it is translated into another language. The technique, which can also be used simply for notetaking, is illustrated with a text in French. (MSE)

Genre analysis is a form of discourse analysis that can provide useful and sometimes surprising new perspectives on understanding teaching and learning. Uses two examples to illustrate the application of genre analysis in mathematics education. (Contains 23 references.) (ASK)

Teachers and students can use color to identify different types of writing. This article describes using color to highlight annotations, identity, topic sentences, thoughts and emotions, logical arguments, advertising and selling, showing and telling, and looking and seeing. Includes sample assignments for identifying emotional content, topic…

Discusses how the development of critical thinking skills is inhibited in many students because they under-conceptualize the context in which controversy occurs. Suggests ways to raise students' awareness of being involved in a continuing debate, such as using written dialogue as a basis for extending a writing assignment that combines exposition,…

Notes the value of producing representational "outcomes" (which may be sketches, diagrams, tables, or graphs) to illustrate the concepts in passages of reading or discussion themes. Describes the way charts were used to help students study novels. (GT)

A broader view of grammar looks at text rather than the sentence as the framework for communication from thematic, semantic, and pragmatic points of view. (MSE)

Explains how semantic webbing (a process for constructing visual displays of categories and their relationships) works with a basal reader story and presents some teaching strategies for effective semantic webbing. (HOD)

Presents data which shows, in a systematic and objective way, how the same speaker can express the same meaning in a variety of ways depending upon the social situation. Such data offer the teacher of English a basis for discussing some of the linguistic features involved in this variation. (Author/PJM)

A series of French language classroom exercises to be used over four class sessions applies principles of semiotics to literary textual analysis. The session themes include decoding and interpreting, reconstructing meaning, sociocultural connotations in the text, and sense of time and space. (MSE)

Citation practice in scholarly writing is the enactment of a set of beliefs shared by the academic community, and it is these rituals which enact and thereby confirm adherence to certain values. The citation practices of a whole discourse community can be viewed as a representative anecdote of collaborative effort to establish the collective…

Applies three major points of American pragmatism to the development of technical writing assignments: (1) restricting the writing environment to the practical, workaday world, (2) emphasizing the complex contexts of purpose and audience, and (3) verifying the effectiveness of any piece of writing by its intentions. Offers criteria by which both…

Children's literature, with its complex structures and discourse strategies, helps beginning language students develop reading strategies and begin understanding discourse strategies in native speech. Tsao's notion of discourse analysis is used to introduce topic deletion in a sample of literary texts. (Contains 25 references.) (LB)