This book makes a scholarly contribution to the debate about standardized testing in American education by using the methods of discourse analysis to examine not only representative material from reading tests but also children's responses to it. The book is particularly attentive to the role of culture in shaping children's understanding of what…

The following articles appear in this issue: "Changing Views of Language in Applied Linguistics" (Gillian Brown); "Society, Education, and Language: The Last 2000 (and the next 20?) Years of Language Teaching" (Michael Stubbs); "The Secret Life of Grammar Translation" (Malcolm J. Bensen); "Changing Views of…

This paper advocates a pragmatist approach to teaching the composition of academic discourse. It discusses teaching directly the conflicting positions of academic discourse as elitist jargon or as key to advanced conceptualization. The suggested pedagogical method involves the examination of academic discourse in general, and the procedure of…

Thematic progression (TP) is examined in the text of a communication between a cardiologist and a general practitioner concerning a patient, offering a clinical diagnosis of the patient's condition. Analysis of the discourse looks at the field, tenor, and mode of the communication as a context for TP. The methods of analysis are first described,…

A study explored how Retrospective Miscue Analysis (RMA) is successful, using discourse analysis of the questions and discussion strategies used during RMA. Seven readers with successful RMA sessions who represented several age/grade groups, ethnic groups, and linguistic backgrounds were chosen, and their discourse was analyzed over a period of 8…

The findings indicated that there were no significant differences between good and poor readers in the nature of information recalled or in their use of perceptual connectives. The type of passage, however, did have a significant effect on the number of perceptual connectives given in the recalls. (Author/NQA)

Findings support (1) the claim that the power of style is directly related to judgments of competence in a hypothetical court case and (2) less strongly, the claim of a direct relationship between power and communicator attractiveness. (Language style features included intensifiers, hedges, polite or hesitation forms, and deictic phrases.) (PD)

Concludes that both average and poor readers are able to make inferences when reading materials at their instructional reading level. (FL)

The importance of the distinction between form and function in language use, the appropriateness of language to varying situations, the elements of discourse structure, and the paralinguistic features of communication are discussed. Classroom activities employing these principles to develop communicative competence are included. (PMJ)

Presents a computer analysis of talk-silence patterns of mixed sex triads related to levels of communication apprehension. Results indicate that high apprehensives talk less, talk less often, and are interrupted less often than low apprehensives. Discusses the implications of computer use in talk-silence behavior research. (JMF)

Describes research conducted in France on text readability and suggests that readability formulas give high scores to redundant texts that have no great interest and penalize texts with original information. Argues that a coefficient should be incorporated into readability formulas that reflects the nature of the text. (MKM)

Discusses the common problems encountered by Israeli students in reading specialized English discourse in four different disciplines. (CFM)

Argues that the study of discourse and the larger context of social interaction requires explicit reference to a broader organizational setting and aspects of cultural beliefs often ignored by students of discourse, conversational analysis, and paralinguistic and nonverbal activities. (FL)