This study discusses the role of stylistic analysis in the development of critical language awareness (CLA) which is crucial for assessing ideologies transmitted in discourse. The Critical Stylistic approach is used to compare narrative strategies in fiction and non-fiction: in Ishiguro's novel "The Buried Giant" (2015) and in Wolff's…

This research analyzed adequacy of referential expressions in the narratives of bilingual and monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical language development (TLD), aiming to shed light on the relative contribution of morpho-syntactic, discourse-pragmatic, and semantic constraints. Narratives were collected from 51…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether Japanese university EFL students produce summaries of a narrative story differently under two different conditions: When they refer to the original text and when they do not do so. Specifically, the study examined the students' use of selection and deletion rules as well as paraphrasing…

The present study builds upon research in the CAF (complexity, accuracy, fluency) framework for examining learner performance to compare the lexical and syntactic complexity of learner output in spoken discourse and synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) during completion of narrative tasks. Data were generated from transcripts and…

This article presents a study examining how narrative structure and narrative complexity might influence the performance of second language learners. Forty learners of English in London and sixty learners in Teheran were asked to retell cartoon stories from picture prompts. Each performed two of four narrative tasks that had different degrees of…

Compared the oral narrative skills of 31 school-aged children diagnosed at 24 to 31 months with expressive language delay with those of 23 typically-developing peers. Suggests that the use of narrative structure may be a specific area of underachievement for late talkers, in addition to their continuing weakness in syntactic and lexical abilities,…

The descriptions of a terrorist attack on a Paris restaurant--an audio recording of a juvenile eyewitness, an audio recording of a researcher reading a text about the event, and a newspaper account--are compared for discourse characteristics. (MSE)

Purpose: The authors describe the procedures used to explain an unexpected finding that adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) had a lower mean length of utterance (MLU) than typically developing (TD) children in interviews without picture support, but not in narratives supported by wordless picture books. They hypothesize that the picture support of…

Purpose: To examine the functional impact of specific language impairment (SLI). Specific goals were to determine whether (a) subjective ratings of narrative quality differentiate children with SLI from their normally developing (ND) age-mates, (b) laypersons and teachers differ in their ratings of narrative quality, (c) objective measures confirm…

Study examined the effect of mode of discourse (narration and argument) on the syntactic complexity of compositions written by sixth, tenth, and twelfth graders. At each level, syntactic complexity was greater in argument. Findings suggested that while syntactic complexity increases with age, increases tend to level off earlier in narrative…

The aim of this study was to determine universal versus language-specific aspects of children's ability to organize cohesive anaphoric relations in discourse. Analyses examine narratives produced on the basis of two picture sentences by subjects of four ages (preschoolers, 7-year olds, 10-year olds, and adults) in four languages: English, German,…

Differences between reporting and classificatory functions in writing were examined in the responses of grade 10 and grade 12 students: 60 who were successful English students, and 60 on the borderline of passing in each of the grades. The reporting tasks required students to write compositions describing their first day in a high school or some…

This in-depth study explores problem areas of Hong Kong secondary and university students in writing narrative and argumentative compositions on two different themes. Subjects were 40 university English majors, 40 form four and 40 form six secondary students. The research indicates that the students at these grade levels experienced difficulty in…