The syntactic complexities of English sentence structures induced the Indonesian students' sentence-level accuracies blurred. Reciprocally, the meanings conveyed are left hanging. The readers are increasingly at sixes and sevens. The Sentence Crimes were, therefore, the major essences of diagnosing the students' sentence-level inaccuracies in this…

Background: In reading research, children with specific language impairment (SLI) have tended to be included in groups of children expected to have difficulties with both decoding and reading comprehension (generally poor readers). This is because generally children with specific language impairment display difficulties with phonology as well as…

Writing samples were analyzed for syntactic maturity, productivity and word selection; for conventions such as tense and number markers and number agreement; and for spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. Only spelling performance proved significantly different in favor of low achievers. (Author)

In order to account for the ways in which combined and decombined sentences work, and to determine why some texts are perceived as being well-written and others are perceived as poor and ineffective, 11 texts were selected for distribution to students for ranking, all on the same topic--the Civil War. Overall, students ranked Bruce Catton's "Grant…

Excerpts from articles in the "British Medical Journal" and "The American Journal of Medicine" were compared to determine which journal was easier to read and what stylistic traits might account for such ease. Nine paragraphs from the discussion sections of articles on hypertension were taken from each of the journals. When…

Hunt and O'Donnell's Aluminum Paragraph was administered to sixty Canadian college students enrolled in English as a Second Language (ESL) courses. The students were asked to re-write and to improve a paragraph consisting of 32 short, single-clause sentences. The students were identified as low intermediate, high intermediate, and advanced in…

To determine formal principles of discourse processing and production, a study reviewed theories in various disciplines related to language and/or thought and thereby rationalized an approach of quantitative matrix analysis to the problems caused by discrepant discourse structures encountered in second language learning. Statistical analyses of…

In a written discourse consisting of a string of "psychological paragraphs," there is in each such psychological paraqraph a "head" structure containing the topic which derives from the deep structure of the discourse. That "head" assertion differs from all other assertions in the psychological paragraph in that it carries new information. The…