There has been increasing interest in the possible applications of corpora to both linguistic research and pedagogy. This study takes a corpus-based, genre-analytic approach to discipline-specific materials development. Combining corpus analysis with genre analysis makes it possible to develop teaching materials that are not only authentic but…

Describes the essential factors of developmental changes in argumentative writing behavior of children between the ages of 10 and 16, in particular on 4 tasks: an argumentative writing task, a textuality task, an argumentative script inference task, and an argumentativity judgment task. (SR)

Combining linguistics and composition studies in a two-part article (in which part 1 presented the principal concepts of cohesion and information management used in spoken and written discourse) this paper, part 2, describes a model that applies some of these concepts in analyses of the content of samples of published writing in three disciplines…

A study investigated the importance of sentence topic in written discourse. Training second language writers to identify sentence topics in drafts of their written work has been proposed as a central means of helping writers achieve greater coherence. The study explored the notion that "topic" is a psychological rather than linguistic concept, and…

Six judges evaluated 20 randomly selected essays from a remedial writing program at the University of Houston to study racial differences in writing and the reasons for such differences. The judges, who were not informed of the race of the writers, examined the essays for the following writing features: free associations, redundancy (ineffective…

Discusses how discourses construct teaching, by examining "the Literacy Letters," a correspondence between pairs of middle-class teachers and working-class women enrolled in an adult basic education course. Challenges the ideology that class, race, and gender differences, while present in American society, are absent from American…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with the following topics: (1) the adolescent writer's developing sense of audience; (2) the entry skills, methods, and attitudes of intermediate composition students in postsecondary composition programs; (3)…

Provides annotations of research studies in the areas of language, literature and media study, writing, and English teacher education. (HOD)

The purpose of the present study is to investigate, within the textual framework of "academic journalese", what happens to Danish and Finnish writers' English texts when edited by native English-speaking editors for publication on the World Wide Web. We use the term academic journalese to describe texts written by researchers or…

To determine the usefulness of cohesion frequency analysis in differentiating proficiency in the oral and written composition of English as a second language (ESL) learners, 22 adult learners of ESL were asked to write and tell a story. After transcription, the data were analyzed by holistic evaluation, cohesion form and frequency count, and error…

Intended to chart the interconnections of linguistics, stylistics, and the teaching of composition, this book encourages a productive collective effort to cultivate linguistics among teachers of writing. Chapter titles and their authors are as follows: (1) "Grammar in American College Composition: An Historical Overview" (R. J. Connors);…