Reviews research concerning instructional applications of discourse analysis for student reading and writing, including large-scale studies of student writing, text-based studies, reading comprehension, and semantic mapping. A large unannotated bibliography is included. (CB)

This study investigates topic units and suggests some practical applications to the teaching of composition to native speakers and second language learners. A topic unit is a structural unit beyond the sentence. It is composed of clauses and consists of two parts -- a head proposition and a set of comments. The head proposition consists of the…

Reports on a study of judges' strategies in clarifying their verbal explanations of constitutional rights to criminal defendants. Identifies six clarification processes and compares them with other studies of clarification processes and with the properties of simplified registers, particularly speech addressed to first- and second-language…

A review of research on second-language writing looks at literature in four areas: research attempting to understand the norms and demands of writing; studies focusing on understanding students, their composing, and their texts; research on the functions of second-language writing instruction and classroom interaction between teacher and learner;…

The suspicion that some second language learners' problems in reading can be attributed to a lack of literacy in general rather than to a lack of fluency in English per se motivated the present study. The hypothesis suggests that readers learn literacy only once and that a lack of literacy in one's first language can be more of a barrier to…

Argues that communicative competence is as important in writing as in speaking, and that more emphasis should be placed on written work and writing skills in the second language classroom. Discusses some of the insights that discourse analysis provides into written communication in the areas of pragmatics, semantics, lexicon, and syntax. (EKN)

The pyramid, or hierarchical diagram, is used in teaching writing English as a second language (ESL) as a visual representation of the way English speakers and writers organize ideas, for comparison with discourse organization in other cultures. A common problem of ESL students is an inability to organize ideas hierarchically. One class activity…

The book is an introduction to the field of contrastive rhetoric, an area of research in second language learning that identifies learners' problems in composition and attempts to explain them by referring to the rhetorical strategies of the first language. It traces the history of contrastive approaches to the study of second language writing and…

Reports on a project incorporating pragmatic analysis into the second language classroom. Cooperative learning groups of first-year ESL students in a composition class analyzed variation in the use of linguistic features across a set of texts. Exercises of this type are asserted to be useful in promoting awareness of the different potential uses…

Minority cultures develop homogeneous customs, language, and thought patterns that affect the writing of individuals from these cultures. Once a student moves outside this homogeneous environment--for example, from an ethnic ghetto to white, middle class classrooms--ideas that seem to the writer to relate clearly to one another do not seem logical…

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

This study analyses specific written discourse production in which NNSs' usage of English tenses and voice appears to be dramatically different from that of NSs. The data for the study narrowly focuses on a small number of verb phrase features, such as tenses, aspects and the passive voice, examining how they are presented in writing instruction…

A study investigated the effects of instruction in metadiscourse on composition students' writing skills. Subjects were students in two 100-level college composition classes. A Control Class (CC) was taught using a process approach, and the Experimental Class (EC) had direct teaching of metadiscourse. The CC students worked on the propositional…

This collection of articles on the nature of discourse and writing instruction include: "Une demarche de psychologie de discours; quelques aspects introductifs" ("An Application of Discourse Psychology; Introductory Thoughts") (Jean-Paul Bronckart); "Les procedes de prise en charge enonciative dans trois genres de texts expositifs" ("The Processes…

Three papers written by graduate students on educational linguistics are included. These papers represent works in progress by students and professors on topics ranging from speech act analysis and classroom discourse to language planning and second language acquisition. The papers are generally based on research carried out for courses offered in…