This article traces the history of college writing and suggests a different way ahead. To show why we need this approach, the article historicizes the start of postsecondary English as a paradoxical one, committed to egalitarian ideals while privileging narrow and exclusive English usage. To offer an alternative approach, the article synthesizes…

The patterns of paragraph writing as commonly used in the international journal are deemed necessary to be studied by scholars of non-English background wishing to write an article for publication in the international journals. Scholars of non-English speaking background, according to a number of research reports on rhetoric contrastive, have a…

Using the academic writing sub-corpora of the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus as data and building on previous research, this study strives to identify the most frequently-used multi-word constructions (MWCs) of various types (e.g., idioms, lexical bundles, and phrasal/prepositional verbs) in general…

Purpose: The purpose of this investigation was to compare the rates of using African American English (AAE) grammatical features in spoken and written language at different points in literacy development. Based on Kroll's model (1981), a high degree of similarity in use between the modalities was expected at Grade 3, and lower similarity was…

English has gradually become the lingua franca of medical publications and conferences across Europe, with scholars from "smaller" languages opting for English because of the greater scientific impact and prestige associated with a wide international audience; at the same time, however, this transition has disrupted well-established textual…

Writing and speaking are clearly related activities, but the acts of production are different. To what extent are the underlying processes shared? This paper reports three experiments that use syntactic priming to investigate whether writing and speaking use the same mechanisms to construct syntactic form. People tended to repeat syntactic form…

Reports on the use of Systeme-D, a writing tool for learners of French that combines a bilingual word processor with an interconnected set of language reference materials, as a research tool to investigate the types of queries language learners use during the composing process. (24 references) (CB)

Little is known about grammatical sophistication in the written language of school-age children. This study provides normative data on the occurrence of different complexity levels of major grammatical parameters in written compositions of nine-year-old children. These parameters include productivity of language, correctness of language usage, the…

This article discusses punctuation in Spanish, specifically rules for the use of the comma, the colon, and the semi-colon. The rules for the placement of prosodic and orthographic stress are also discussed. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

This article discusses the relationship between human gestures and the development of Chinese characters. The four main principles of Chinese writing are outlined, and the characters are discussed in terms of whole bodily attitudes, spatial relationships, and foot and manual gestures. (CLK)

A warning about the alarming situation in which written Spanish finds itself, not only in the daily press but even in more literary publications. More and more popular expressions and corruptions are finding their way into the written language. Attention to this situation is recommended. (Text is in Spanish.) (AMH)

This paper describes the preliminary results of research currently underway concerning sex-based differences in written composition. Sixty themes written by college-age native speakers of English were chosen for study. The themes were typed exactly as they had been written. No corrections were made. They were numbered alphabetically by the names…

THE CLOZE PROCEDURE WAS USED TO INVESTIGATE THE PREDICTABILITY OF LANGUAGE MATERIALS AND TO EXAMINE THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE WRITTEN PRODUCTION OF LANGUAGE AND READING TO STRUCTURAL AND LEXICAL CONSTRUCTS. FIFTY-SIX SOPHOMORES RANDOMLY SELECTED FROM 152 STUDENTS ENROLLED IN INTRODUCTORY PSYCHOLOGY COURSES AT CAMPBELL COLLEGE WERE RANDOMLY ASSIGNED…

Verbs (4800) from 1200 compositions written by Nebraska students (grades 3-6) were examined using the most sophisticated grammatical analysis available to determine children's use of the English verb system and to compare their use to recent studies of the verb in adult writing. Information obtained included the following items: Children used…