In a study of young children's use of conjunction in narrative discourse, different types of discourse were collected from 34 preschool children: visually prompted stories, stories told without visual stimuli, responses to questions about the prompted stories, explanations of a game, and responses in interviews. The discourse was analyzed for the…

In order to facilitate the decentralization of the Illinois writing assessment program, this handbook describes and provides materials for writing assessment training workshops. The first of the nine sections in the handbook gives a general overview of the Illinois Writing Assessment. The second section, on training for assessment, describes…

To relate the way in which children structure stories at different age levels to their performance on other tasks or to their general stage of cognitive development, a study required subjects of four age groups to participate in working memory tasks in two different paradigms and to generate stories involving a variety of characters. The structure…

This study investigates contextualization processes in two psychiatric interviews. Specifically, it analyses how different analytical tools--frame and narrative--work to clarify contextual embeddings and story bits. Frame analysis provides a way of looking at local and larger social contexts in talk. Specifically it provides a way of understanding…

Type of discourse and syntax are related; speech researchers will have to specify type of discourse for their results to be comparable with other studies. (JH)

Written syntactic complexity is considered in relation to the four modes of discourse (argumentation, exposition, narration, and description). In a study of 153 children at three ability ranges within each of three grade levels (three, four, and five), syntactic complexity was found to differ significantly across the modes. The range of syntactic…

In a small informal study of the process of children's writing, three children, aged 9, 10, and 11, were observed as they wrote. Specifically, the study sought to discover how the children approached the task of writing, the manner and extent of their interaction, and the result of this interaction upon their writing. Each child's writing was also…

This paper suggests that a change in mode of expression --narrative, descriptive, or expository--can influence the syntactic complexity of children's writing. The implications of the research studies reviewed here may offer direction for education in general. Instructional strategies which make use of variation in writing mode to encourage gains…

This study examines recall of narrative prose for evidence of underlying structures such as the grammar used in the story's sentence structure. Subjects listened to repeated presentations of a tape recording of two pages from a history book, with verbals collected after each presentation. The subjects used in this experiment were 13 undergraduate…

The purpose of this article is to suggest the value of a research tool which has rarely been used in studies in instruction in writing: baseline measurement of group and individual performances. This approach was used in examining the results of a study of a self-instructional program in narrative writing which was prepared for and tested by…

Thematization, the relative frequency of a discourse referent, and topicalization are conceptualized as related discourse functions. In a probe recall experiment, a word with a thematized referent was a better recall probe than a word with a nonthematized referent. Also, an agent noun was a better prompt than a recipient, and this semantic…

If dramatic characters are to be rendered "three dimensional" in performance, both the dramatist and the actor/interpreter must create them with proper attention to the physical, sociological, and psychological aspects of character. If oral interpreters understand these dimensions of a particular character, they can analyze such elements as…

Thirty fifth-grade children participated in a study of regressions in oral reading of narrative and expository material. A cloze test, a retelling task, and a comprehending task were administered to each student. Analysis of regressions in reading indicated nine categories of cause of regression: correction, anticipatory problems, intonation…

Describes a study of fifth grade students' ability to process information from a play, and compares the results to related information from television research. (JC)

Content analysis of American television commercials since 1971 reveals several differences between the portrayal of men and women, but many of the gaps seem to be narrowing. The findings are discussed in terms of the potential effects of exposure to stereotyped depictions on viewers' sex role attitudes. (Author/BJV)