This study examined the differences in processing between regular and dyslexic readers in a lexical decision task in different visual field presentations (left, right, and center). The research utilized behavioral measures that provide information on accuracy and reaction time and electro-physiological measures that permit the examination of brain…

Transcripts of undergraduate group discussions uncovered strategies used to explore assumptions: defining, qualifying definitions, eliminating inappropriate meanings, broadening the context, testing generalizations by hypothesis and personal anecdote, challenging generalizations, challenging the original question, challenging the validity of…

Reports on an experiment in which 2 groups of 20 Japanese learners of English as a Second Language performed 2 monologic production tasks with and without time for planning. It was found that providing learners with time to plan their utterances results in interlanguage productions that are more complex. (64 references) (Author/VWL)

Investigated the role of context constraints on the course of predictive inferences during reading. Constraints were determined by manipulations of a context sentence that affected the extent to which an event was predictable. (Author/VWL)

Reports on a qualitative study of dyadic discourse between university students of Spanish as a foreign language. Explored the social and cognitive behavior of learners as they participated in second language speaking activities. Repair, as it is formulated in the ethnomethodological approach to conversation analysis provided the lens through which…

This paper considers the process by which humans are able to select from the complex string of sounds impinging on the ear and understand certain frequency combinations to be linguistic signals while other combinations are not. A brief review of the complex subcortical region, particularly the known but seldom studied reticular system, indicates…

A study investigated the relationship between cognitive style and coherence in discourse. The primary hypothesis was that coherence would vary bimodally by cognitive style classification. Forty-four freshman composition students from three west coast colleges completed the Culture Fair Intelligence Test, the Group Embedded Figures Test, and the…

Two college-able learning-disabled writers' social and cognitive profiles and the sense of audience in their written texts are examined. The students' deficits (visual and organizational cognitive processing, and oral language comprehension/production) affected their writing, and the quality of their audience awareness was related to the nature of…

Recently there has been an increasing interest in the development of children's impressions of stories, partially due to the work of theorists who have proposed formal grammars representing structural characteristics of stories. In order to learn more about children's narrative competence, stories they produced were analyzed in three experiments.…

A study compared the effects of cognitive complexity on the speech production of 14 advanced non-native speakers of English and 14 native English-speakers. Cognitively simple and complex tasks were distinguished based on text type (narrative versus expository). Subjects read one narrative and one expository text in separate sessions, then wrote…

A study of the effectiveness of a language proficiency testing method using partial dictation is reported. The study used 60 undergraduate students at a Mexican university studying English as a second language under a traditional four-skills approach. The partial dictation exam was a combination of dictation and cloze procedure. The entire text is…

This study of second language learning investigated the effects of a written reading comprehension exercise and an oral discussion activity as alternative tasks mediating between a written text and learners' summaries of the text. Subjects were 80 University of Hong Kong freshmen, randomly assigned to three groups. Each group was provided a…

This book contains 20 articles, from a wide variety of perspectives, designed to bridge the interests of researchers and teachers on the topic of current composition research. The following articles are included: "Studying the Writing Abilities of a University Freshman Class: Strategies from a Case Study" (Charles R. Cooper, with Roger…

The proceedings of a conference designed to give researchers and educators the opportunity to discuss issues affecting public education, this report opens with a description of the Research and Development Exchange Coordinating Group's initial efforts to address teacher concerns in oral and written communication instruction. It then lists…

Offering a variety of perspectives, the articles in this book are intended for those who teach reading and writing; those who make policy influencing what is taught, how, and to whom; and those individuals who would influence the influential. The 18 articles are grouped into four sections: "Literacy, Politics, and Policies"; "Forms of Literacy";…