Focuses on how people from different cultures organize and sequence texts in different ways and how students write essays in a second language that follow the rhetorical patterns of their native language. The article describes the types of essays Chinese students must write for the university entrance exam in their home country. (10 references)…

Students received a personalized or nonpersonalized version of a narrated animation explaining how the human respiratory system works. The narration for the nonpersonalized version was in formal style, whereas the narration for the personalized version was in conversational style in which "the" was changed to "your" in 12 places. In 3 experiments,…

The purpose of this essay is to examine how writing has shaped the nature of the Quarterly over 75 years. Here the author explores how stylistic elements have changed over time, how form has interacted with function and content, and how well the resulting text has served the several communities within physical education. He makes the following…

Numerous studies have investigated the linguistic expression of stance and evaluation in university registers, focusing especially on academic research writing and to a lesser extent classroom teaching. The present study extends previous research in two ways: (1) it compares and contrasts the use of a wide range of lexico-grammatical features used…

In this article, the author relates her experience in teaching poetry and how it shapes everything she and her students do in the classroom. As a language arts teacher for students in grades 7 to 12, she discovered poetry to be magical in many ways, for it offers such advantages as, brevity, which allows a quick reading and discussion of a…

This paper reports on research into the literacies of pre-service teachers and the implications for both mapping and developing students' literate competences. The research focussed on two questions: (1) If tertiary literacies are multiple, how do we bring these into relationship with one another and with the different discourse domains of…

Despite the important role the personal statement plays in the graduate school application processes, little research has been done on its functional features and little instruction has been given about it in academic writing courses. The author conducted a multi-level discourse analysis on a corpus of 30 medical/dental school application letters,…

Concepts in cognitive psychology are applied to the language used in military situations, and a sentence classification system for use in analyzing military language is outlined. The system is designed to be used, in part, in conjunction with a natural language query system that allows a user to access a database. The discussion of military…

It has been suggested that all speech communities have varieties of simplified speech regarded as appropriate for use with individuals who do not have a full command of a language. These simplified codes are conventionalized within speech communities and are learned by the same process of cultural transmission as other language behaviors. This…

An approach to teaching stylistics, or writing style, to high school and college composition classes is described in this brief article. AUTHOR'S COMMENT (excerpt): Composition teachers generally recognize and appreciate grace in writing. But teaching or learning that grace is difficult at best. Perhaps style cannot easily be taught, but it can be…

The relationship between language and symbolic play was studied in a sample of children identified as referential in style (multiple noun utterances exceeded pronoun or no-noun utterances), as compared with a sample identified as expressive in style (pronoun utterances or no-noun utterances exceeded multiple noun utterances). Children were…

Many current French textbooks and teaching plans (in Germany) cling to obsolete usages and forms (e.g., imperfect subjunctive), as "bon usage," and to "educated" pronunciation. Teachers should teach living, present-day French, rather than the available teaching material. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Refers to important articles from the 1973-74 volume of the Czechoslovak journal "Rusky jazyk." The linguistic portion deals with questions of conversational speech and stylistics. Relevant to teaching Russian are articles on FL teaching installations, factors leading to failure in language learning, and categorizing language errors.…

A data-based study done in Philadelphia examined the constraints on relative pronoun deletion and looked for a possible correlation to social stratification or stylistic variation. Restrictive relative clauses only are examined. Constraints appear to be due to performance factors related to sentence processing. (SCC)

A marital argument over the content of a previous conversation is analyzed using an interactive discourse analysis approach. The analysis focuses on the frequency and use of particular discourse strategies to show how marked use of these strategies may not only typify speakers who share similar "high involvement" conversational styles,…