To test the hypothesis that induced mental imagery would facilitate the contemplation and reflection that have been suggested as being important to the writing process, a study investigated the effects of instructions to induce mental imagery upon the written language of young children. Subjects, 28 third grade children, were randomly assigned to…

This report describes a study on the development of children's conceptualizations of written language, that is, their graphic sense. The study investigated three issues: (1) whether acquisition of literacy is a developmental process common to all normal children, (2) whether the levels of graphic sense tend to be associated with particular…

To find differences and similarities between spoken and written English, analyses were made of four specific kinds of language. Twenty adults, either graduate students or university professors, provided a sample of each of the following: conversations, lectures, informal letters, and academic papers. Conversations and lecture samples came from…

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…