The proceedings of the Georgetown Round Table on language and public life are divided into four sections dealing with: (1) language in public life and international affairs, (2) language spread and language policy, (3) language and the professions, and (4) the language of public persuasion. The articles in these sections treat the following…

Twelve seventh grade and 23 eleventh grade students participated in a study that investigated age differences in the use of discourse planning. Subjects were given a list of games and asked to indicate which they knew well enough to explain to a peer. Subjects acting as speakers were seated at a table with a tape recorder present. Half had a…

To examine political debate formats with regard to past usage and future possibilities, an analysis was made of the format features of the 1960, 1976, and 1980 general election presidential debates. Also analyzed were the formats used in the primary debates for Democratic presidential candidates in 1976 and for the Republican presidential…

These five papers reflect a single project--discourse analysis in the curriculum. The first paper, "The Small Group Course as a Setting for Naturalistic Research" (Charles Petrie and Charles Laufersweiler), describes the teaching process of integrating both a graduate and an undergraduate class from which the other four papers describe resulting…

Working on the assumption that members of organizations create their own organizational reality by interpreting the behaviors and activities they see, the stories and myths about the organization that they hear, and pressures to conform to the norms and practices of the organization that they feel, a study examined a total of 58 stories collected…

A study investigated the relationship between cognitive style and coherence in discourse. The primary hypothesis was that coherence would vary bimodally by cognitive style classification. Forty-four freshman composition students from three west coast colleges completed the Culture Fair Intelligence Test, the Group Embedded Figures Test, and the…

This paper inquires analytically about the connotative meaning of the terms poverty and learning as they function in the language of comparative education research. In the analysis of concepts, the analytical techniques used are the techniques of definition, explication, illustration, and substitution. Four conceptions of the term learning and…

This article attempts to capitalize on the current efforts to examine the traditional discourse, to consider one that focuses on ethics, to examine resistance to alternative discourses, and to provide a tentative educational administration curriculum model that reflects ethics at the core of everything that is taught in educational administration…

This paper studies meaning as a construct of human interaction. Basic to this approach is the concept of the act of communication, which may be realized verbally or non-verbally. In order to integrate non-verbal behaviors into descriptions of discourse and interaction, a series of functional, not anatomic, categories is needed. For the kinesic…

The development of a story grammar represents an attempt to describe the higher order cognitive structures that are used to encode, represent, and retrieve information from stories such as folktales or fables. These structures, defined as a set of rewrite rules, specify the types of information that should occur in stories and the types of logical…

This is an examination of beginning teachers' acquisition of the structures of classroom discourse. Teachers were compared at the beginning and at the end of their first teaching year using a discourse analysis system. Thirty-three hours of audiotapes from 11 teachers were transcribed an coded. Teacher initiations during informing, eliciting, and…

The analysis of story recall, a device used widely in reading research to gauge comprehension, typically involves a process of mapping recall against the original story. The process is based on the assumption that subjects are aiming for verbatim recall. To test the validity of this assumption, an analysis was conducted of 20 narrative retellings,…

Teachers read student papers with both eager and anxious expectancy about discourse they have caused but not written. Whatever the teachers may have said about what they will look for as they read, they still measure each paper against their ideas about appropriate performances in each of the categories of textual analysis. They are not reacting…

To determine the number of distinct words in printed school English, a study analyzed a 7,260 word sample from the "Word Frequency Book" prepared by J. B. Carroll, P. Davies, and B. Richman. Projecting from the sample to the total vocabulary of school English, the best estimate was that it contained about 88,500 distinct words. Furthermore, for…