A 3-year study was undertaken to identify the salient features of verbal academic (math and science) language performance of third- and sixth-grade students. The investigation classified both native and nonnative English-speaking students as either effective communicators/responders or unsuccessful communicators/responders. The study examined…

Topics covered in papers presented at a Finnish workshop on discourse analysis include, in English: the situational code in conversation; persuasive strategies and face-work in impromptu speech; historical aspects of complex behavioral strategies in politeness; the implications of predictability and unpredictability for negotiation discourse; and…

This collection of symposium papers on varieties of the English language used in Ireland includes: "The Role of Irish English in the Formation of Colonial Englishes," by P. Trudgill; "Anglo-Irish Verse in Translation from Irish," by P. L. Henry; "The Methodology of Urban Language Studies," by J. Milroy;…

The focus of the study reported here was to investigate people's comprehension ability as a function of the number and type of negations embedded within sentences similar to those which might appear as premises in syllogisms. The subjects were one group of 11 Hispanic and four groups of Anglo students, with 15 in each Anglo group. Thirty-two…

A selection of the papers from a symposium on the application of linguistic concepts to teaching composition are contained in this document. The papers and authors are as follows: "Introduction: Coherence, Composition, and Text Linguistics" (Nils Erik Enkvist); "TUAP and the Teaching of Writing in Sweden" (Lennart Bjork): "Discourse-Level…

Noting that the proliferation of discourse by and about the women's movement makes focus imperative in a bibliography dealing with feminism, this annotated bibliography concentrates on rhetorical analysis of American feminist rhetoric. The 42 cited items, most of which appeared in communication journals or were presented at communication…

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 role and relationship of discourse and context; (2) political autonomy and accommodation to political alternatives as two major dimensions of political socialization; (3)…

A study was designed to assess the effect of text format on the decoding and comprehension proficiency of third and fifth grade students. Subjects were 36 students at each grade level who completed a battery of comprehension and decoding measures and then read a set of four stories that had been especially constructed for the study. Each story…

The reading recall protocols of 24 tenth grade and 24 twelfth grade students were used in a study that investigated the relationship of average reading ability and high school grade placement to recall of expository text with adversative and attributive structures. Two test passages were written in an adversative structure with contrasting…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 33 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) aphesis in English; (2) the linguistic representation of tone; (3) discourse structure and anaphora in written and conversational English; (4) a tagmemic…

This paper discusses the results of a study comparing the language of preschool children from low-income homes to that of their parents as affected by the adult participation in training sessions planned to encourage language development. The study was conducted in three preschools in the Detroit metropolitan area. A total of 96 children from ages…

This paper reviews the history of contrastive analysis (CA) against the background of its objectives and its present problems and presents an outline of procedures which seem to be necessary to make the methods meet the objectives of applied CA. CA in the United States was closely connected with structuralism, which was an obvious cause for later…

Contrastive analysis is viewed as an interlinguistic, bidirectional phenomenon which is concerned with both the form and function of language. As such, contrastive analysis must view language psycholinguistically and sociolinguistically as a system to be both described and acquired. Due to the need for a psychological component in the analysis,…

Data on one aspect of a year-long sociolinguistic study of participant perspectives of classroom discourse are presented in this final report. Second-, third-, and fourth-grade pupils in a lower socioeconomic, mutiethnic elementary school viewed videotapes of language arts lessons given earlier in the day. Each videotape was presented in three…

Part of a year-long sociolinguistic study of teacher and pupil perceptions of classroom discourse, this study presents data on pupil perceptions of discourse in play settings. Subjects were 165 pupils from six second, third, and fourth grade classrooms in a lower socioeconomic, multiethnic elementary school. In each of the six classrooms six…