One of the most important functions for metadiscourse (reading directives) is to serve as textual relevance cues. Readers must use metadiscourse to determine the specific task or communicative context for understanding the total meaning of a text. Some of the more common types of metadiscourse include (1) hedges--words used to convey a note of…

This report sets forth some notions which attempt to provide some perspective on the relationship between work on discourse and the needs of educators. The position is taken that a perspective focused on the individual school and setting is necessary and that educators themselves must participate in the research if the growth of research in…

The individual writing conference is one of the key settings in which adults are taught to write. Success in the conference can be connected both to its structure (who can talk when and how much, and what types of talk are sequenced in what ways) and to the content within that structure (what topics are discussed, the amount of collaboration…

Recent research in text structure and comprehension has several important implications for readability theory and practice. First, text-level factors such as coherence and organization must be considered along with word-level and sentence-level factors when evaluating the readability of a specific set of materials or when attempting to construct…

An oral screening test administered by an adult to a five-year-old child was transcribed and analyzed. The test was chosen as an example of a referential communication task that is also a social communication task. The analysis demonstrates that a participant in communication assumes that the other participants are employing strategies for…

The specific concern in this study is to consider the nature, social significance, and consequences of syntactic variation in the question forms used by judges when taking guilty pleas from criminal defendents. Nine judges from a court of general jurisdiction in Arizona were observed and tape-recorded while presiding over several procedures that…

This compilation includes the following essays: (1) "Conversational Inference and Classroom Learning" (John J. Gumperz); (2) "Persuasive Talk--The Social Organization of Children's Talk" (Jenny Cook-Gumperz); (3) "Ethnography--The Holistic Approach to Understanding Schooling" (Frank W. Lutz); (4) "Triangulated Inquiry--A Methodology for the…

A study was conducted to determine the role of story grammar in children's ability to detect misplaced information in simple narratives. The subjects, 27 second grade and 25 fifth grade students, each read six stories that had been developed for the study. The stories were one-episode narratives comprised of six grammatical categories with two…

An experiment was conducted in which the story schema, an idealized representation of the parts of a typical story and the relationship among those parts, was derived inductively by examining a large number of actual published stories to extract their common properties. In addition to developing a schema that simultaneously defines the essential…

The tendency to think of a literary work as an object or entity existing apart from author and reader has been the greatest stumbling block in literary criticism and the teaching of literature. The transaction between a reader and a text involves the reader in a highly complex, ongoing process of selection and organization. Keeping the reader's…

An approach to the teaching of writing to English as a Second Language (ESL) students at Queen's College (City University of New York) is described. Starting from the observation of the learners' difficulties as well as their other learning activities, especially reading, a methodology is proposed based on the training already in progress in…

An analysis of classroom discourse is reported in which the use of questions by science teachers is assessed in terms of arguments to establish knowledge claims. Questions are analyzed not for their form or frequency but for their function in the development of arguments which establish claims rationally. Seen in the context of rational argument,…

The papers included in this collection represent as closely as possible the content and organization of the oral presentations delivered at a March 1980 conference on the use of readability formulas. The papers discuss the following topics: (1) an introduction to the conference, with general remarks on the uses and criticism of readability…

As part of a research project studying ways in which police "culture" is socially constructed and displayed in police talk, six members of a research team rode on patrol with officers of a small community police department, during all three shifts, for a period of four months. Conversations during the rides were recorded. Analysis of the…

SAM (Script Applier Mechanism), a computer program designed to understand stories that rely heavily on scripts (typical sequences of events in particular contexts), is described in this report. Chapter one, which discusses SAM's background, shows how causal chaining was developed to connect events in stories, presents a typical script, and…