There are three dominant conceptions of functional sentence perspective (FSP): (1) a sentence should be analyzed into several segments, each having a different degree of what is called communicative dynamism; (2) a sentence should be analyzed into two segments, the theme and the rheme; and (3) a sentence should be analyzed into two segments, the…

This study investigated subjects' ability to combine and organize information from different sentences, as well as their ability to retain that information. Ninety-six college undergraduates were given three trials to learn the characteristics of ships from a text. Attributes of each ship were clustered together (name organization), or sentences…

It is contended that there are such things as discourse blocs, and that they are composed of discourse units glued together into a contextuated whole by bloc signals. There are three kinds of structures with which it is necessary to deal in order to discuss coherent discourse: the discourse bloc, the discourse unit, and the bloc signal.…

An analysis of the kinds of sentences used by students in sample ETS English Composition Test essays, and a survey of some of the actual weaknesses of these papers (e.g., shifting subjects, use of incorrect idiom, and inaccurate or incorrect word choices or usages) point to real gaps in student writing skills. Elements found in good papers (e.g.,…

Twenty-five Philippine languages and dialects were studied to determine the manner in which words, clauses, sounds, and sentences group together to make up units larger than the sentence. Data obtained were analyzed according to tagmemic theory. The introduction to this volume (see also AL 002 032 and AL 002 033) gives a brief orientation to the…

The purpose of this study was to determine what effects the Christensen Rhetoric Program, a method of teaching sentence and paragraph development, had upon the attitudes of 43 black college freshmen just entering Tennessee State University and upon the persistence of these students in using free modifiers after a lapse of time and instruction.…

To gain a sense of good rhetorical structure, what students of writing in English as a second language need to do is not to practice writing paragraphs and essays conforming to particular patterns, but rather to recognize and understand the resources available for indicating relationships between the propositions that make up their own, unique…

Textual puzzles may be used in freshman composition or introduction to writing courses to emphasize word order and subject-predicate agreement. These sentence puzzles demonstrate that the English language depends primarily upon word order to convey meaning, and assist students to avoid blending statement and question word order in their sentences…

Describes a program for understanding and generating natural language which handles paragraph-length imput. Its core, "preference semantics," a system of preferential choice between deep semantic patterns, is contrasted with: (1) syntax-oriented linguistic approaches, and (2) theorem-proving approaches to understanding. Available from…

Two studies investigated characteristics of verbal elaborations (length and number of relations provided by the syntactic construction) to determine what makes them effective mediators for young children. Study I treated the role of an elaboration's length in facilitating paired associate learning in 22 nursery school children. Data indicated that…

Data presented in this report are the results of the special assessment of writing mechanics conducted during the 1978-79 school year by the Education Commission of the States (ECS) for the Department of Defense Dependents Schools (DoDDS). The purposes of the study were (1) to examine writing abilities of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students enrolled…

Presents a three-stage process for teaching the logical relationships that exist in paragraphs to aid high school students in differentiating main ideas from subordinate statements. (MKM)

This workshop guide is designed to help civil service students both learn to use good grammar and develop their technical writing skills. Discussed are such topics as nouns, gender, number, person and case, appositives, pronouns, mood, verbs, (transitive and intransitive), adjectives and adverbs, comparisons, articles, conjunctions, infinitives,…

The purposes of this study were to replicate the effects of question placement, either before or after, on the acquisition of critical and incidental material with grade school subjects and to determine the effects of paragraph length on learning with children. Two variables, question placement (BA) and pacing (PL), were combined in a 2 x 4…