Attaining coherence in writing remains a huge challenge for English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners. This study investigated how EFL college students structured their expository essays and attained coherence in a content-based language learning course by comparing the effects of the cognitive and linguistic approaches. Three classes…

Background: Cohesion refers to the linguistic elements of discourse that contribute to its continuity and is an important element to consider as part of written language intervention, especially in children with language learning disabilities (LLD). There is substantial evidence that children with LLD perform more poorly than typically developing…

The present study examined whether knowledge of connectives contributes uniquely to expository text comprehension above and beyond reading fluency, general vocabulary knowledge and metacognitive knowledge. Furthermore, it was examined whether this contribution differs for readers with different language backgrounds or readers who vary in reading…

This study examines how three age-on-arrival (AOA) groups of Chinese-background ESL students use two types of cohesive devices on a standardized essay exam. A discourse analysis of 90 first-year students' expository writing samples was conducted to ascertain how factors such as first language (L1) and length of residence (LOR) in Canada influence…

Urges secondary school English teachers to encourage students to experiment more with repetition as a writing technique. (SW)

"The principal aim in this article has been to point out that the logical relationships can be contained in a fairly limited list and to suggest an approach for using this list as a teaching aid in the comprehension of written exposition." (Author/FWB)

This article profiles a group of college students with learning disabilities, outlines strategies used to help those students in their 100-level expository-writing class, and illustrates persistent writing problems with three student writing samples. This study revealed that, even with explicit support, students whose learning disabilities had an…

While teaching mechanical aspects of writing in English as a second language (ESL) to ten- and eleven-year-olds has been found to be relatively simple, the most difficult thing to teach, and the first to break down when guidance is removed, is logical information sequencing. Without guidance, most children will produce random sentences, but when…

Describes a psycholinguistic investigation of children's competence in the production of extended discourse, concentrating on discourse form (narrative versus expository) and production modality (written versus spoken). (SKC)

Concludes that children could attend to texts selectively when reading or listening to expository prose, and when reading, but not in listening to narrative prose. (FL)

Investigates the relationship of reading ability and age to children's recall of expository text after reading and analyzes children's sensitivity to text structure. (MKM)

A study investigating the effects of "text linguists'" revisions on the comprehensibility of expository prose had as subjects 92 high school juniors who read original and revised versions of two passages from a high school history textbook. The revisions included changes regarding the given-new contract, schemata, reference, lexical…

Three experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that a paragraph composed of sentences with identical or closely related topics would be easier to read than one whose sentence topics were only remotely related. The first experiment involved subjective judgments by 131 high school students on the readability of two paragraphs identical in…

To test the hypothesis that paragraphs composed of sentences with identical or closely related topics (the grammatical subject and its adjuncts) would be easier to read than a paragraph whose sentence topics were only remotely related, two experiments on the readability of paragraphs were conducted. The first experiment involved subjective…

Two articles on sentence construction and eight on the paragraph comprise this publication. Francis Christensen contributes four articles on (1) the use of loose, cumulative sentences, (2) sentence openers, with illustrations from Hemingway, (3) a generative rhetoric for the paragraph, and (4) the formation of principles of paragraph composition…