This paper examines the ways that teachers use questions to promote metacognitive knowledge and skills in early childhood classrooms. Taking a Conversation Analytic approach, we show that although metacognitive questions were infrequent in our data, they could be used to create learning opportunities for students to develop their knowledge of…

Purpose: The study examined the contributions of Spanish and English oral narrative skills to English reading among 95 early elementary dual language learners (DLLs) from Spanish-speaking homes in the United States. This sample of first- and third-grade DLL children attended Spanish-English dual language immersion programs and received language…

Encourages the adoption of a hierarchical model of discourse by teachers. (DD)

Defines a set of binary relations as illustrative of a hierarchical model of discourse. (DD)

Seymour Chatman's kernel/satellite theory is used to analyze the plot of John Galsworthy's short story, "The Japanese Quince." The theory considers the distinction between major events (kernels) and the minor supplementary ones (satellites) in a narrative as an easily proven psychological reality. (six references) (LB)

Discusses how schema theory and discourse analysis together form an especially strong theoretical framework for the use of video in the second-language classroom. (Author/OD)

Explains the use of critical discourse analysis in adult literacy education as a way to understand and change power relations. (SK)

"Verbal atom cracking," according to Kenneth Burke, entails a process where the reader reconstructs what the writer has constructed--a necessary process before the reader can begin deconstructing. Foregrounding opposites, rather than looking for apposites, may not be the best way to approach discourse that covers especially esoteric…

In decoding a text, one chooses the interpretation involving maximal redundancy, selecting meanings that are most likely and least surprising in the relevant context. Clues for this selection of meanings are gathered from phonetic, phonemic, morphological, syntactic, lexical, and stylistic levels. In disambiguating third-person-pronoun references…

Milton's style of pronominal reference in his essay, "Areopagitica," leads to a lack of comprehension at times and to slow processing. His use of demonstrative pronouns makes it difficult to identify antecedents precisely and quickly. For example, in one case a reader must go back over 400 words to find an antecedent. His use of relative…

Working from theories of text grammar and logic, the authors suggest and tentatively confirm several hypotheses concerning the role of micro- and macro-structures in comprehension and recall of texts. (Text is in French.) (DB)

The reader's knowledge about how a message is woven into discourse plays an important role in reading comprehension. This article first reviews reasons for student difficulties in comprehension, sentence groups, and sense units and then presents a basic discourse framework and its applications for analyzing text passages. (Contains two…

A method of training pupils to read for total comprehension by an analytical approach is proposed. Specific techniques are suggested. (RM)

The writing-reading process is a total interacting system comprising four subsystems: the writer, the text, the reader, and the context. A model of the complex interactions among these four subsystems is useful to the extent that it provides a framework for established facts, and in so far as it explains phenomena and suggests hypotheses. While…

During oral and silent reading, retention was related to segment length and existence of sentence boundary. Next limits on retention were tested by increasing segment length and difficulty. Performance of less skilled readers was uniformly low; performance of skilled and older readers was again affected by length and sentence boundary. (Author/CP)