Research is in progress on oral interactive discourse, that is, discourse produced by several participants working in collaboration. The intent of the research is to investigate how the discourse is organized at several different levels of structure (acts, sequences of acts, interactive structure, propositional content, and formal realizations).…

Although for the 15 years preceding his election as President of the United States Ronald Reagan muted his anti-Soviet rhetoric in order to achieve political power, since his election he has returned to anti-Sovietism in an effort to redirect American foreign policy against the Soviets. At the same time, however, he employs a rhetorical strategy…

One of the most memorable eulogies delivered in the United States Senate is the one by Senator Michael Mansfield for President John F. Kennedy. An analysis of his word choice reveals that he (1) forced the audience to participate in the creation of the message; (2) employed active, forceful descriptions; (3) focused on praiseworthy qualities of…

An analysis of how 252 newspapers from nearly 100 countries covered the assassination, on September 14, 1982, of president-elect Bechir Gemayel of Lebanon was conducted. The purpose was to determine whether news reporting in developed nations is different from news reporting in developing countries. Methodology included quantitative and…

The functional writing model is a method by which students learn to devise and organize a written argument. Salient features of functional writing include the organizing idea (a component that logically unifies a paragraph or sequence of paragraphs), the reader's frame of reference, forecasting (prediction of the sequence by which the organizing…

Seven different age levels were used to test the correlation between age and unfilled pauses (UP) and between age and parenthetical remarks (PR) in narratives elicited by visual stimuli. (Author/AM)

Using as an example indirect discourse in English, the article shows in detail how the introduction of "pragma-linguistic dimensions" requires a different approach from that of the traditional pedagogy, for teaching FL with communicative ability as the chief goal. Concrete teaching suggestions are given. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Attempts a preliminary typological study of sub-languages constituting one national language. Three types of sub-languages are distinguished: natural language, language of science, and informational language. They are compared to the three levels of language analysis, speech, norm and system. (RM)

There exists a need to identify and recognize the Spanish dialect used in the Southwest United States in order to change the tradition of looking at it as inferior to standard Spanish and to English. The history of the Spanish-speaking people in the Southwest and of the changes in their culture brought about by colonialism is connected with the…

The study investigates whether input and interaction features which previous research has identified as characteristic of native speaker (NS) - nonnative speaker (NNS) speech (features which occur more frequently in NS-NNS speech than in speech between NSs) will occur with equal frequency in NS-NNS speech settings in which the NNSs have…

One of the most important functions for metadiscourse (reading directives) is to serve as textual relevance cues. Readers must use metadiscourse to determine the specific task or communicative context for understanding the total meaning of a text. Some of the more common types of metadiscourse include (1) hedges--words used to convey a note of…

This report sets forth some notions which attempt to provide some perspective on the relationship between work on discourse and the needs of educators. The position is taken that a perspective focused on the individual school and setting is necessary and that educators themselves must participate in the research if the growth of research in…

The individual writing conference is one of the key settings in which adults are taught to write. Success in the conference can be connected both to its structure (who can talk when and how much, and what types of talk are sequenced in what ways) and to the content within that structure (what topics are discussed, the amount of collaboration…

Recent research in text structure and comprehension has several important implications for readability theory and practice. First, text-level factors such as coherence and organization must be considered along with word-level and sentence-level factors when evaluating the readability of a specific set of materials or when attempting to construct…

An oral screening test administered by an adult to a five-year-old child was transcribed and analyzed. The test was chosen as an example of a referential communication task that is also a social communication task. The analysis demonstrates that a participant in communication assumes that the other participants are employing strategies for…