Analysis of the role of paraphrase in the cohesion of everyday oral discourse suggests that combining two methodological approaches to discourse analysis, using distribution of specific discourse elements and sequential relationships within discourse, creates a more empirical foundation for analysis, leading to a more accurate formulation of the…

This study examines children's knowledge of structural properties of expository text: topical relatedness, superordination, and cohesion. Nearly all who completed the paragraph-construction tasks were able to identify paragraphs. Seventh-graders were adept at describing what makes a paragraph but experienced difficulty in placing main-idea…

Descriptive grammars based on sets of rewrite rules were constructed to summarize the structure and organization of 120 entries in a second grade student's journal of class news. These rules illuminated the relationship between experience, abstraction, and generation of structure, and the use of structure to express complex thoughts. (PMJ)