Argues that persuasive qualities in the Plan of Delano (a powerful persuasive document in the interrelated Chicano and farm worker's movements of the 1960s and 1970s) are illuminated best from the perspective of its own ethnic legacy. Demonstrates that the Plan's Mexican-originated generic form and Mexican-American cultural context reveal sources…

Studies discourse cohesion from the perspective of a speech/gesture synthesis. Presents cross-cultural evidence showing the joint contribution made by both speech and gesture to the process of creating discourse topics. Proposes a dialectical model of discourse production. (HB)

Investigates older adults' reading comprehension skills through syntactic measures and measures of sentence content. Analyzes the apparent reading difficulties of older adults. Provides guidelines for the preparation of prose materials for older readers. (HB)

Analyzes "Amos 'n' Andy," a key text in the evolution of broadcast forms. Examines its institutional context and its representational strategies. Assesses the impact of its discourse on both radio as a cultural form and on the perceptions of listeners, particularly its role in the larger social discourse on race. (SR)

Examines news accounts of lives caught in violent political conflict--accounts of suffering and death that record a discourse closer to silence than to talk. Concludes that such journalism can be read as a flight from chaos and a demand for order, or as an appeal for human solidarity in the midst of history's cruelest contingencies. (SR)

Examines the communicatively constructed nature of Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) and gender. Analyzes actual routine work conversations to produce 12 discourse patterns that discriminated between high, medium, and low LMX relationships. Focuses on the functioning of the patterns and the influence of gender in the construction of high, medium, and…

Presents the background, influences, and consequences of a self-conscious mathematics discourse production in New Zealand called Maori Mathematics. Describes some aspects of the movement towards Maori language instruction in mathematics and examines the effects on the language itself. Poses questions about the effects on mathematics and…

Proposes a model for creating citations in academic writing that relates variation in citation language forms to writers' ability to control how they position themselves and their texts within a multimember colloquy that comprises the past, present, and future academic community. The model is potentially valuable pedagogically and for analyzing…

Describes an upper-division English course called "The Rhetoric of AIDS," focusing on learning to read the cultural discourses of science, medicine, government, public policy, sexuality, and social justice. Discusses classroom discussions, teaching collectives, collective educational projects for the rest of campus, and community-service projects,…

Explains the rhetorical implications of actions and states in various models of procedural discourse and in specific writer strategies. Considers more flexible alternatives to the "streamlined-step" model. States that one goal of technical communicators may be to help ensure that systems are designed, developed, implemented, and supported with…

Contributes to the building of journalism and news-reporting theory and scholarship on news reception. Finds a ubiquitous use of examples presented in media coverage confirming the angle from which a story has been presented. Finds that exemplars are often presented along with vague generalizations, which leave the viewer little chance of judging…

Uses the modern concept of genre to define the "case write-up" (the dominant written genre in case-based business schools). Concludes that case write-ups prepare students for classroom performance in the central event of the classroom, the oral analysis of the case. Argues that the write-up prepares students to solve problems, make decisions, and…

Relates the author's own experience of reading "Morning Girl," by Michael Dorris, as an example of practicing literary criticism. Provides an in-depth analysis of "Morning Girl" and how it could be interpreted and discussed through Langer's model of envisionment building. Illuminates Langer's theory so that it may be applied to…

Discusses the incorporation of content-based instruction in the English department of one school. As a result, verbal interaction was increased. With this success, the use of narratives was implemented in a whole-language project, with an emphasis on discourse analysis, specifically story grammar. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on generic discourse practices by tracing the persuasive heterogeneity and the distributed nature of discourse genres in use. Three examples from research are explored: a father and his two daughters playing a family-created verbal game; a family's engagement with their 2-year-old's creative retellings of "The Tale of Peter Rabbit"; and a…