This guide is designed to promote discussion of any photograph with students, whether encountered in the classroom, in textbooks, or in other school materials. The guide contains a one-page handout which uses Dorothea Lange's photograph "White Angel Breadline" to discuss 10 photographic elements: aesthetic elements, punctum, title,…

A discussion of text translatability in simultaneous interpreting (SI) looks at semantic redundancy, the repetition of semantic components essential to creating an utterance, and offers some classroom techniques for teaching interpreting skills. It is proposed that the translatability of a text in SI should be studied in terms of the experiential…

Metadiscourse can be classified into two types: informational and attitudinal. Informational metadiscourse directs readers to an understanding of the primary message by referring to its content and structure or to the author's purposes or goals. Attitudinal metadiscourse directs readers to an understanding of the author's perspective toward the…

A review of literature in the speech communication field from 1978 to 1983 reveals developments emerging in the area of forensics, while a review of the contributions to theories of debate analysis reveals advances in both policy systems theory and in hypothesis testing. Although much of the research is directed toward forensics educators, it is…

Designed to assess immediate and delayed comprehension of expository prose, this instrument is a 40-item multiple-choice test composed of open-ended stems, each followed by four nonoverlapping choices. Control of content of the items was based upon an analysis of the accompanying 1,300-word passage on the Kalahari Desert. Validity, reliability,…

Recent theoretical advances in text analysis and reading comprehension research are discussed and some implications for the related domain of textual interaction in composition in English as a second language (ESL) are suggested. The reading comprehension research reviewed is research from the perspective of written text as communicative…

A study examined sentence production errors and syntactic complexity in students' writing in two modes of discourse and at three grade levels. Subjects, average and high developmental students enrolled in seventh, ninth, and eleventh grade classes, each wrote two compositions, one in the descriptive the other in the persuasive mode. Data analysis…

Richard Nixon's 1952 "Checkers" speech was an innovative use of television for political communication. Like television news itself, the campaign fund crisis behind the speech can be thought of in the same terms as other television melodrama, with the speech serving as its climactic episode. The speech adapted well to television because…

Probes the nature and extent of public conversations as indicators of community cohesiveness. (MH)

Mary M. Juzwik draws on a grounded study to propose a hybrid theory of classroom genres that builds on Bauman's conceptualization of the "dialogization of genres." This perspective foregrounds Bakhtin's earlier and more literary work, while backgrounding Bakhtin's later, more social scientific perspectives on genre. In particular, Juzwik…

Theodore H. White's "The Making of the President 1960" is widely acknowledged to be a classic of contemporary political history. Using the concepts of Northrop Frye, a study examined the narrative structure of White's work and contends that the book's power derives from its form as a quest story in a high mimetic mode. As such, the book…

Arguing that writers must be able to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of the texts they produce, this paper begins by isolating some of the persistent questions raised by people in education, business, and government who want to judge how well their texts are working. The paper then compares the cognitive processes involved in "reading…

To study any social movement is ultimately to examine an intricate social drama. With the publication of "The Jungle" in 1906, Upton Sinclair emerged from the stormy background of the muckraking movement to become one of that movement's principal actors. But in the 1920s, long after the Progressive reformers dusted and put away their…

Artificial intelligence research on natural language understanding is discussed in this report using the notions that (1) natural language understanding systems must "see" sentences as elements whose significance resides in the contribution they make to the larger whole, and (2) a natural language understanding computer system must…

Anwar el-Sadat's speaking style became a key factor in his ability to maintain a balance between the goals essential to Egypt's future and the position taken by Israelis in the settlement of the Mideast conflict. Three speeches (two addressing the Egyptian National Assembly, one the Israeli Knesset) were examined to explore the rhetorical choices…