A pilot study explored what children between the ages of 8 and 11 focus on when they write about writing: how children define writing, what features they believe constitute the act and product of writing, and what kinds of writing children consider important and why. During a half-hour period, 36 students in grades 3 through 5 were asked to write…

A study explored collaborative writing practices in six major professional associations: (1) The American Institute of Chemists, (2) the American Consulting Engineers Council, (3) the International City Management Association, (4) the American Psychological Association, (5) the Professional Services Management Association, and (6) the Society for…

This paper examines the results of two sociolinguistic studies of the Arabic spoken by men and women in Jordan and Syria in terms of sex differentiation in Arabic. The study reported in this paper proposes that the terms "prestigious" and "standard" should not be used interchangeably; accordingly, it reinterprets the previous…

What parents view as being important for their children to learn and how they believe their children are able to learn are reflected not only in the learning opportunities provided in the home but also in the teaching strategies parents use with their children in every day parent/child interactions. An investigation of the language transactions…

Intensive peer review is a method of teaching expository writing developed two years ago by A. N. Doane and now used extensively in freshman expository writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Students meet regularly in groups of four three times a week over the course of the term to share and critique each other's writing. The instructor…

Business language is directed both outward, toward the general public and inward, toward the particular type of business. In the first instance, it approximates lay language and has contributed some expressions to common usage. In the second instance, it departs from lay language and becomes specialized within each industry, sometimes to the point…

A study investigated the effectiveness of strategies designed to improve reading comprehension, in order to (1) determine the effectiveness of the Cloze Story Map (CSM), a cloze-mapping strategy, on improving the reading comprehension of fourth-grade students using expository text and different sorts of deletion procedures; (2) investigate the…

Recent research on children learning to write, coming from a mix of disciplines (English education, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and rhetoric), is described in this volume. The introduction, by Marcia Farr, emphasizes how the research contributes to understanding (1) of research methodology and theoretical frameworks, and (2) of…

Since the early nineteenth century, scholars have marveled at the unlettered Cherokee native named Sequoyah--or Sikwaya--and also known as John Guess--or Guest or Gist--who, unassisted, developed a medium for the written expression of the Cherokee language that was uniquely appropriate to the peculiarities of the spoken language. There is much…

Noting that the new literary and rhetorical theories are concerned with revealing the constructive nature of productive and interpretive processes, this paper examines the cognitive processes in reading and writing which make them constructive and intentional acts, and how reader and writer "negotiate" meaning in light of context, reader…

This bibliography provides citations to studies of word/letter frequencies and vocabulary applications based on issues of word frequency. While the original intent was to gather information pertinent to developing communication board vocabularies for argumentative communication systems, these resources should be useful for a variety of word…

A study of the possible transfer of reading skills from a first language other than English to English, called script-carryover effects, focused on two aspects of the written language: (1) the manner in which the script represents information about sound and meaning, and (2) whether or not the script uses the same graphemic characters as English.…

This paper draws upon a theory of stories that relates particular text structures to particular affective states and then relates the affective states to story intuitions and overall judgments of liking. The first section of the paper outlines the theory as it deals with some important properties of the genre of popular stories in Western…

Teaching Spanish while either restricting classroom use of the textbook or ignoring application of the computer is a losing proposition. Withdrawn from the typographic-video world that engages them daily, students are deprived of their most comfortable means of knowledge acquisition. Typography and visual images can be an immeasurable aid in…

Good writers, as compared to a randomly-chosen comparison group, spent more time in both prewriting and writing, revised more, re-read more often during writing, and were more concerned with the purpose of their writing. (JH)