This study identified reasons to believe that one particular way of teaching writing is theoretically sound; explicated the use theory of meaning; defined a theory of rhetoric which was compatible with the use theory; presented a set of beliefs about the nature of thought and about how the mind learns; and presented exemplary classroom activities…

An exploratory study of quantitative measurement of syntactic and rhetorical fluency examined students' writing near the beginning and near the end of a two-quarter, freshman English program. The syntactic analysis focused on the clause, which was classified according to basic syntactic type and elaborating syntactic structures. The rhetorical…

Summary of author's doctoral dissertation, "Syntactic and Semantic Elements of Students' Oral and Written Discourse: Implications for Teaching Composition, Stanford Univ., 1967.

The occurrence of Black English Venacular (BEV) dialect features in the writing of 42 inner-city college students was studied using such sociolinguistic methods as variable rule analysis, computer programs, and implicational scales. A comparison of the patterns found in the subjects' writing with those found in spoken BEV revealed that sometimes,…

Second language students may develop writing skills gradually, or they may learn and practice these skills through the use of sentence combining techniques. A study is reported of the consistent use of sentence combining exercises with intermediate language classes at the university level. A total of 325 students enrolled in intermediate French,…

An experiment on relative clause formation involving Cantonese students who were learning English was conducted. The study sought to determine whether sentence combining exercises would help Chinese students construct long relative clauses instead of the short relative clauses that exist in their first language. For the experimental group each…

The linguistic abilities demonstrated by second grade students show a high level of competence in the use of syntactic structures and lexicon. This report describes and interprets, in terms of language function, the talking and writing of fifteen Australian children. Transcripts of conversations provide the basis for the linguistic analysis and…

This paper deals with the computer's production and recognition of sentences in a connected discourse and its application to computer assisted instruction. Studies of textual properties in real discourses have been carried out at the paragraph level. The theoretical concepts of representing paragraph content in terms of (1) the factual data…

A study explored the relationship between oral and written patterns produced by a group of black college freshmen enrolled in remedial writing classes. Forty students were asked to produce, in formal language style, both oral and written summaries of a reading selection. The data were analyzed to determine (1) the extent to which patterns,…

Seven objective measures of language production--number of words, T-units, subordinate clauses, clauses of all types, words per clause, words per T-unit, and clauses per T-unit--were applied to 269 compositions written by seventh, ninth, and 11th graders to test assumptions about the relationships between quality of writing and students' age and…

This monograph reports a longitudinal study of the language development of 211 pupils as they progressed from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Data include transcribed interviews, written compositions, reading and IQ scores, listening scores and ratings, teachers' ratings on specified language factors, and reports of books read. Results…

Using data consisting of descriptive and expressive-narrative essays written in 1969 and 1979 by black 17-year-old students in the stratified probability sample from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a study investigated which language patterns differentiated the NAEP essays written by black students in 1969 from those…

This volume, first in a series of French publications of specialized, introductory books to the study of linguistics, develops a structured, panoramic view of characteristic thought concerning the study of stylistics. Five major areas, each presenting excerpts of significant publications on a particular aspect of the problem, are developed under:…

This study investigated register features of 164 foreign students' English writing before and after full-time courses in English for academic purposes. Results indicate the major changes were from features of spoken English to those more typical of formal writing, both in surface detail and in more fundamental characteristics. Less change occurred…

This paper describes one college-level English-as-a-Second-Language teacher's use of error analysis in an effort to understand students' problems with reading comprehension and writing. The research was undertaken in a Japanese junior college. Three studies are presented. In the first, 59 students in a general English course listed sentences they…