This report presents the text analysis of "Babar Loses His Crown," a story for beginning readers. (The techniques used in arriving at the analysis are presented in a Reading Center Technical Report, Number 168, "Problems and Techniques of Text Analysis.") Tables are given for a statistical lexical analysis and for a syntactic…

M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan have provided a system for analyzing the cohesive relations that enable a sequence of T-units to be considered a complete text. (A T-unit consists of a main clause and all its dependent clauses.) These concepts of cohesion proved effective in analyzing the differences between five "high" and five "low" quality essays…

A study was conducted to investigate: (1) what linguistic and mental abilities are involved in composition; (2) to what extent undergraduate students in India possess these abilities, in English and in their native language; and (3) to what extent these abilities are being taught. The major portion of the paper discusses the nature of composition,…

This study examined dominance attempts of grade school children engaged in a cooperative task. Within each of three grade levels (K, 1, 3), eight mixed-sex triads were randomly formed. Utilizing verbal indices of dominance, significant differences were found for cross-sex and same-sex attempts, by grade level and triadic composition. The results…

Writers and writing teachers should be wary of depending on readability indexes as indicators of the difficulty of written messages. The Gunning Fog Index and the Damerst Clear Index, two readability formulas, were used to determine the readability of "A Statement of Editorial Policy" and two abstracts appearing in an issue of…

This booklet is one of a series of teacher-written curriculum publications launched by the Bay Area Writing Project, each focusing on a different aspect of the teaching of composition. The basic principles of literary cohesion (the way a text hangs together) are discussed and exercises are suggested to help students increase their sensitivity to…

An investigation was conducted comparing six college students who used cognitive mapping to two control groups, each with five students, who used a self-selected study strategy and reading. Cognitive mapping is a study strategy that displays the meaning of text through a diagram depicting the interconnectedness of the ideas in the text. Results…

Anthropologists have indicated that the need to act politically and to avoid the appearance of such action is marked in egalitarian societies. The perils of confrontation in such societies often foster indirect and highly allusive speech. This paper invesitgates the relationship between direct and indirect speech in an Indo-Fijian community which…

A study was conducted to determine whether (1) readers would express an awareness of structural disruption in stories, (2) there were developmental differences in the extent to which readers were aware of structural disruption, and (3) there were developmental differences in the types of structural disruptions that disturbed readers. Fifty third…

Although the acts of reading literature and writing are closely linked, literature study and composition instruction remain distinct pursuits within college English departments. Style seems to be an interest that unifies the two pursuits. The most common view of style equates it with acceptable rhetorical and grammatical conventions. A second view…

This paper examines how the exchange of information in medical interviews is organized, and how that organization produces and constrains the negotiation of treatment decisions. The analysis is drawn from the verbatim transcripts of audio-taped practitioner/patient communications, information gathered from medical files, and other ethnographic…

Several frequently used oral language constructions are discussed in order to discover how frequently native speakers use these constructions, to observe which form of a disputed construction native speakers choose, and to review several widely used English as a Second Language (ESL) textbooks to determine whether or not they address these…

In addition to helping students revise thoughtfully by placing them in situations where revision matters, advanced composition instructors can use the complementary method of discourse analysis scales. These scales provide advanced writers with ample data for making decisions about revisions, and for identifying relevant semantic, syntactic, and…

Seven successful and seven unsuccessful employment interviews were videotaped and analyzed to discover how communicative behaviors grounded in rhetorical theory contributed to applicant success. The employers completed pre and postinterview questionnaires that helped to assess the effects of the interviews and to control the effects of the…

Much recent research into college writing has focused on syntactic measurements. Significant problems inherent in such use of these indices arise for their validity at and beyond the college level and center on the terms "maturity,""complexity," and "growth.""Maturity" has not been satisfactorily defined, nor has the level of competence been…