The reader's knowledge about how a message is woven into discourse plays an important role in reading comprehension. This article first reviews reasons for student difficulties in comprehension, sentence groups, and sense units and then presents a basic discourse framework and its applications for analyzing text passages. (Contains two…

Examines Korean president Roh Tae-woo's 1988 Inaugural Address. Focuses on audience expectations on this occasion, which include the influence of Confucianism and of Western political ideas, recent Korean political history, and the speech as an inaugural delivered at the end of an unusual and challenging campaign. (SR)

Addresses the discourse domains of academic writing in English and Polish using the example of school writing. The English argumentative-expository essay is related to its potential counterpart in Polish.(Author/VWL)

Analysis of a sample of 84 speech acts in everyday discourse referring to mental retardation identified four themes: (1) the discourse of category membership, (2) the dichotomy of normal and abnormal, (3) issues of place and space, and (4) fear. Results suggest how speech acts construct mental retardation and devalue individuals with the label.…

Argues that second-language learners should be given the opportunity to listen to authentic discourse within the language classroom and practice forms of language that will facilitate successful exchanges beyond the classroom. Examines the main questions confronting the classroom teacher when integrating authentic spoken discourse into a language…

Investigated the relative importance of various grammatical and discourse features in the evaluation of second-language writing samples produced by college students enrolled in beginning and intermediate French courses. Three native-speaking instructors of French rated 172 essays using a scale that was constructed by a researcher and based on…

Uses a theoretical framework derived from Vygotsky's writings to review studies of science classroom discourse interactions between teachers and students. Suggests that shifting the research focus from isolated instructional activities to promote conceptual change toward viewing such activities in the critically influential context of an ongoing…

A model of bilingual classroom discourse is presented as a set of communicational frames illustrated by data from secondary English classes in Hong Kong. Discussion addresses the difficulty faced by teachers in second-language contexts to encourage communication and participation in a way that does not marginalize the second language. (Author/VWL)

A crucial component of academic lectures is the use of chunks, phrases, and body language, and their role in facilitating understanding. This article examines the function and context of this component in the discourse of academic lectures. (Author/VWL)

Compares the content of conversations generated by elementary school groups at animatronic animal displays in a temporary zoo exhibit and in a permanent natural-history museum exhibit. Finds that moving animal models in themselves are insufficient to induce many visitors to talk about them in other than a superficial, cursory manner. Contains 17…

Explores how undergraduate readers take the protagonist's mental perspective in stories involving conflicting beliefs about a situation. Demonstrates that readers with privileged information build emotional inference corresponding to the protagonist's (wrong) beliefs; inferences related to protagonist's beliefs are backward inferences at the text…

Contributes to research on child-directed speech by examining the use of two types of utterances (reported speech and prompts) in interactions involving mothers, toddlers, and other adults or siblings in rural Senegal. Shows that mothers attempt to promote exchange in a triadic framework, with the goal of making the child part of a complex set of…

Describes one mathematics educator's inclusion of an oral-performance assessment into a mathematics-methods course for preservice teachers at both the elementary and middle school levels. Provides the nature of the assessment and discusses issues related to implementation, and shares reflections on the assessment from the instructor and the…

Six adolescents with traumatic brain injury and six adolescents hospitalized for an illness not affecting the brain were administered two narrative tasks. Both groups produced significantly more coherent and cohesive narratives in a personal-event task than in a current-event task, and there was no significant difference between groups. (Author/CR)

A collection of Webchat interaction data among English non-native speakers (NNS) and native speakers (NS) is the basis for a microanalytic investigation conducted from a conversation analysis (CA) perspective. The main purpose is to discover patterns and conversational strategies used by participants in this on-line context. (Author/VWL)