This chapter highlights the central role of experience in learning and consciousness; it also outlines experience-based instructional processes that adult educators can use. (Contains 1 figure.)

In the current debate about the abstractness of children's early grammatical knowledge, Tomasello & Abbott-Smith (2002) have suggested that children might first develop "weak" or "partial" representations of abstract syntactic structures. This paper attempts to characterize these structures by comparing the development of constructions around…

There is a continuing need to investigate how contemporary students in schools are writing the word, and their world, beyond modernist parameters of the page. This article explores the online writing of a senior English world literature class, located in a Western Canadian city, as examined through a recent qualitative case study. Borrowing a 17th…

This narrative inquiry weaves Schwab's commonplaces of curriculum and Clandinin, Pushor, and Murray Orr's narrative commonplaces through stories of conflict between a professional developer and 30 high school lead teachers. In her role as manager of a mathematics leadership institute situated between two urban public school districts and a…

Although most models of connected discourse are strikingly similar in the types of relationships they describe, they are strikingly different in two areas: the unit of analysis and the dimensions on which cohesion versus coherence are described. Common systems for analyzing written text use the sentence, T-unit, clause, or proposition as the unit…

Designed to determine a reader's ability in processing information relationships in written discourse in English, the extended-cloze instrument consists of six reading passages, each with four complete sentences deleted. Students read each passage and select the best of four multiple choice alternative sentences for each deletion. The instrument…

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether the connective structure of a passage might protect interrelated information from interference by irrevelant information in sentence recognition. Subjects of both experiments were college students enrolled in introductory psychology classes. In each, a rating task for unconnected phrases was…

Developmental changes in the expression of contrast in child discourse were investigated. Contrast is defined as a psychological phenomenon and applied to the domain of discourse topics. The development of the ability to produce utterances that are topically related to the previous conversational turn is considered. Four types and three levels of…

Teachers are often baffled by the inability of a number of basic writing students to use the proper connective to show relationship between sentences or phrases for coherence. Most frustrating is the teacher's inadequacy in giving definitions or explanations beyond the student's textbook descriptions of the connectives. However, a cursory…

Twenty college students, ten each in the experimental and control groups, were the subjects of an experiment designed to demonstrate that integration of verb meanings occurs in connected discourse. Six paragraph-length stories, each of which included one or two critical sentences containing a general verb, were presented orally to the subjects.…

A telephone conversation was transcribed and marked for stress. A portion of the transcription, not marked for stress, was given to native English speakers who were asked to underline the word(s) in each sentence or phrase that should receive the most prominent stress. The overlap of actual stress and the assignments of the participants who were…

The following papers and reports are included: (1) "Prisoners of Code-Centred Privacy: Reflections on Contrastive Analysis and Related Disciplines" by Kari Sajavaara and Jaakko Lehtonen; (2) "The Methodology and Practice of Contrastive Discourse Analysis" by Sajavaara, Lehtonen, and Liisa Korpimies; (3) "Interactional Activities in Discourse…

Two comprehension-time experiments were conducted to identify factors affecting the comprehensibility of written materials. The subjects (a total of 52 college students for the two experiments) were presented with pairs of sentences--"context" sentences followed by "target" sentences--and were asked to relate the content of the target sentences to…

This paper presents a passage written by a student and analyzes the way in which each sentence is or is not connected to those before it and after it, revealing the problems that cause the passage to lack coherence. The paper notes that, although this writer would have benefited from an opportunity to talk out her ideas (rather than a lesson in…