The primary goal of early reading instruction, according to this paper, should be to teach children to comprehend written discourse in a manner similar to that for oral discourse because both types of discourse require decoding ability--graphic or acoustic. The paper asserts that to simply design reading instruction to achieve the subgoal of…

The 10 articles in this book examine how comprehension is affected by what the reader brings to the text, the manner in which the text is structured by the author, and the contextual variables that shape the meaning derived by the reader. Specific topics covered in the articles are (1) background knowledge and comprehension, (2) learning how to…

This annotated bibliography focuses on the fields of cognitive anthropology and sociolinguistics. Topics covered include: (1) classroom ethnographies; (2) conversational and discourse analysis; (3) ecological and sociological approaches to the study of education and schooling; (4) ethnomethodology; (5) communication and speech act theory; (6)…

A study investigated the process of information extraction in reading in order to determine whether language constraints in texts reduced the amount of visual detail noticed by the reader during the reading of specific words. A detailed examination was made of 20 college students' eye movement patterns as they read a group of selected passages.…

This paper describes Directed Activities Related to Text (DART), procedures that were developed and are used in the Reading for Learning Project at the University of Nottingham (England) to enhance learning from texts and that fall into two broad categories: (1) text analysis procedures, which require students to engage in some form of analysis of…

This collection of research on curriculum and program development in languages for special purposes (LSP) contains the following papers: (1) "LSP Curriculum Development--From Policy to Practice," by Ronald Mackay and Maryse Bosquet; (2) "The Problem of Needs Assessment in English for Specific Purposes: Some Theoretical and Practical…

A "gambit" is any of the hundreds of brief, idiomatic rejoinders, rhetorical phrases, or comments that are essential to fluent conversation. This textbook fosters familiarity with such phrases in English by encouraging their use in the carrying out of a series of provocative class exercises, including a handwriting analysis and a "love test."…

Recent studies on written communication have emphasized the importance of discourse organization and rhetoric for the learning of reading and writing in a foreign language. This paper describes an attempt at a contrastive study of specialized discourse in French and in English. A corpus of medical articles all on the same subject has been analysed…

The selective learning hypothesis holds that individuals' learning of prose passages will be affected in varying ways by the passages' threatening or unpleasant content. To test this hypothesis, 19 college students read six prose passages--three containing threatening material and three nonthreatening--and then completed a cloze test for each…

Two studies examined certain aspects of discourse analysis to determine their value in classroom use. The first study explored the relationships among information recalled as assessed by informal reading inventory comprehension questions, unaided retelling, and schema based retelling. Subjects were 15 fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students who…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The nine titles deal with the following topics: (1) the theory and application of presumption in public debate; (2) the rhetoric of transcendentalism; (3) speechwriting in rhetorical criticism; (4) the conspiracy argument as…

In a consideration of the development of referential communication performance, this paper describes three broad capacities that appear to underlie successful performance: the speaker's ability to analyze the persepective of the listener and formulate a message with this perspective in mind, the child's ability to meet the information processing…

Data delimited by the phonology-to-semantics framework of mainstream linguistics are inadequate to account for the subtle influences of first language (L1) upon second language (L2). Unique errors for which there is no L1 correlate are found in samples of written English produced by Japanese and Chinese second language learners. This is due to a…

The semantic change which has occurred in an Austrian community over the past seventy-five years is examined. The study is based on a comparison of an 1897 word list, sound inventory, and phonograph recording with 1973 recordings of sixty informants from four age groups and five socioeconomic strata. In Inmst, the development from an…

A number of issues relating to metaphor are discussed in this report. Offering an account of what makes metaphors "metaphorical" (a way of understanding what metaphors are), the report also discusses some of the psychological processes associated with the comprehension of metaphor (how the understanding of metaphors might come about).…