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…

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)

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…

The entire process of legal writing would be shorter and more effective if writers would give as much attention to the politics of the rhetorical situation as they do to legal research. To do that requires the following considerations: (1) understanding the three dramatic elements in the rhetorical situation (audience, purpose, tone); (2)…

A study to find patterns of cohesion and rhetorical structure that distinguish good from weak English essay writing is described. The corpus consisted of ten Swedish college essays written as part of the final exam in a first-year English course. Methodological problems encountered included the delimitation of units for the analysis of cohesive…

Sentences are understood by outlining associative relations between the concepts representing the meanings of the words. When the words are received the activation spreads from their conceptual counterparts to the other concepts in memory, so that some implicit thoughts are often added to the mental representation of a sentence. As sentences are…