Reviews 33 children's books which stimulate beginning readers. Divides the books into four categories: books that bridge between oral and written language, predictable books, easy-to-read books, and books of special interest to young children. (MG)

The analysis of 2,979 subject-verb pairs in an American science magazine to determine the relative frequency of inanimate subjects with active verbs found that such usage was more prevalent than the use of inanimate subjects with passive verbs, especially when the subject was abstract, typically to show causality or to explain. (22 references)…

Gives an account of the origin and development of the Russian language as it relates to the cultural history and nationalism of various Slavic groups. (90 references) (Author/OD)

Investigation of Spanish speakers' methods of recognizing written English suggested that speakers of Spanish, which has a highly regular spelling system, may rely on a phonological route because subjects performed quite poorly on exception words. (Author/CB)

Examines the syntactic and stylistic features of an emergent phenomenon called Interactive Written Discourse (IWD), the written language occurring in simultaneous terminal-to-terminal typed dialogues. Finds that IWD is a naturally occurring register and a hybrid language variety, displaying characteristics of both oral and written language. Notes…

Argues that if the study of language is to become important again in the teaching of writing, it will be through an expanded notion of rhetoric that understands language as the site of struggle over socially produced meaning. (RAE)

Demonstrates how a dynamic programing algorithm can be developed to segment unusually long written inscriptions from the Indus Valley Civilization. Explains the problem of segmentation, discusses the dynamic programing algorithm used, and includes tables which illustrate the segmentation of the inscriptions. (GEA)

Examines Korea's experience with abandoning Chinese characters for an all-phonetic script. Despite efforts to replace characters with "all-hangul" in South Korea, reform opponents reinstated Chinese characters. In North Korea, a similar reform was also rescinded. Certain "linguistic" problems need to be solved for the reform to…

This article discusses French business letter writing, which is characterized by its convoluted and somewhat antiquated figures of speech and suggests that French for business courses offer students the opportunity to discover in such discourse a rich cultural tradition. (six references) (JL)

A sensitivity training session to help elementary-grade teachers better understand the experience of students with learning disabilities is suggested, using an altered alphabet in a standard second-grade lesson plan format. (DB)

It is suggested that a title provides the key component in a reader's ability to interpret a text. Experiments conducted with short news texts demonstrate that a title that is too vague, general, or inadequate to the main idea of the text entails a longer reading time or deficiencies in comprehension. (eight references) (LB)

Describes a study that explored differences in computer-mediated communication messaging by comparing electronic mail and voice messaging used for giving directions. Highlights include a computational linguistic framework that examines differences between written and oral English, models of direction provision, and hypotheses based on preliminary…

Explores the assumption that writing is a way to learn by examining the influence of task interpretation on writing and studying as learning aids. Finds that task interpretation and the nature of the material to be learned are important mediating variables in the relationship between writing and learning. (PRA)

Analyzes U.S. Supreme Court decisions as speech acts to determine how the opinions communicate the legitimacy of the court's decisions and secure the consensus of the discourse community, investigating such aspects as institutional context, the adversarial context of legal communication, the grammar of conflict, and the rhetoric of discovery. (64…

Effects of time on notetaking and immediate retention, the relative effectiveness of spoken and written cues, and cuing schedules were studied with 160 students. Retention from lecture portions with more or fewer notes was similar, written-cued statements were better retained, and cuing schedules had subtle effects. (SLD)