There are a number of functions paragraphs play in discourse studies. For example, it encourages a writer to give adequate focus to the various aspects of his or her message; and it facilitates the identification of one idea in an essay to another idea. Some classical second language writers (for example: Stern, 1976; Halliday & Hasan, 1976;…

Web-based writing tools, which allow multiple writers to share and edit the same document, have attracted significant attention as computer-assisted language learning tools in the past decade. However, how L2 writers contribute to the shared document as a social action for interacting with other cowriters remains underexplored in L2 research.…

Traditionally, at universities, English as a foreign language instructors have used a series of approaches to teach students how to write academic texts in English from both teacher preparation and regular programs. In spite of this, students continue to have problems writing the academic texts required of them in the different courses. Concerned…

FOUR PASSAGES OF EXPOSITORY PROSE WERE ANALYZED IN TERMS OF EXTRA-SENTENCE STRUCTURES IN THREE SYSTEMS--LEXICAL, GRAMMATICAL, AND RHETORICAL. NONSENSE WORDS WERE SUBSTITUTED FOR ALL CONTENT WORDS IN EACH PASSAGE, GRAMMATICAL ENDINGS ON WORDS WERE RETAINED, AND PARAGRAPH INDENTIONS WERE REMOVED. FORTY-EIGHT COLLEGE UNDERGRADUATES WERE INSTRUCTED TO…

An alternative to the traditional surface measures of text complexity is put forward. The background to the study is an attempt to provide a useful analysis of educational courses being prepared on a text-processor system. The analysis is primarily concerned with one aspect of cohesion in text, the use of rhetorical connectives or items of…

Investigates recursion in the paragraph, discussing it in the context of grammatical hierarchy and illustrating it by use of natural texts. Analyzes two short narrative texts at the paragraph and discourse levels, and presents both in tree diagram and function-set representations. (KEH)

An analysis of paragraph development in letters to the editor and in "Saturday Review and "English Journal articles suggests irrelevance of development methods taught in school. (RD)

Describes the results of three experiments designed to identify cues people use to paragraph text and to determine whether those cues are semantic, formal, or both. (HOD)

Paper written at a linguistic workshop at Ukarumpa, E.H.D., Territory of New Guinea; research conducted under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, July 1968-January 1971, and supported in part by National Science Foundation grants. (DD)

Results of experiments (1) to assess the degree of agreement with which subjects identify paragraph boundaries in unindented prose passages, (2) to determine whether a significant proportion of the cues to paragraph structure are formal in nature, (3) to ascertain whether the identification of paragraphs in different kinds of prose differentially…

Reviews research which indicates that children should be taught to consider their purpose for reading and should receive feedback on whether they have achieved their purpose. (MKM)

Extralexical information, that is, those semantic properties evoked by words which are not usually accommodated in lexicons of any kind, is essential for the comprehension of numerous ordinary sentences in a natural language. A brief review of studies on forms of extralexical information shows that those works do not deal with: (1) questions of…

Research conducted under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics and partially supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. (DD)

Bororo is an unclassified language spoken in central Mato Grosso, Brazil. Field work done under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics; paper written with the partial support of the National Science Foundation. (RS)