Ethnographic classroom research shows culturally different children follow non-congruent patterns in arguments with their peers. Protests by two first grade boys from different cultures are examined, and some ways in which their protesting styles differ are indicated. A Black American child pursues final protests using successively more aggravated…

Four position papers are presented that were given during a study-week dealing with questions related to language as communication, the notion of argumentation in second language teaching methodology, and ways of introducing argumentation phenomena into the language class. The papers, representing four different positions, are the following: (1)…

A study was conducted to examine writing skill, particularly maintenance of coherence, in an environment where the information load was heavy and students would be expected to have problems organizing it. The students, all proficient in English, were enrolled in a postsecondary biology class. Two of the six students in the study had high objective…

The following papers and reports on discourse analysis are included here: (1) "Discourse Analysis, What's That?" by Hatch and Long; (2) "Contextual Analysis of English: Applications to TESL" by Celce-Murcia; (3) "Discourse and Second Language Acquisition of Yes/No Questions" by Vander Brook, Schlue, and Campbell; (4)…

Sound-meaning correspondences produced by an infant were studied under conditions of early rampant homonymy (i.e., production by a very young child of a small set of noncontrastive surface forms or phonetic sequences to refer to objects/events that on the basis of adult standards require the production of numerous contrasting surface forms). The…

Noting that viewing reading as a communicative act can heighten educators' awareness of the ways in which one story can be embedded within another, this report presents and discusses several examples of stories within stories. The report discusses the various participants communicating in a story within a story--the real and implied authors and…

Although content related questions may indicate the depth of a readers' understanding of a passage, they do not necessarily help readers develop more general strategies for extracting information from print. A program of strategies to develop comprephension skills should include prereading instruction, activities that increase awareness of written…

The use of discourse analysis in examining the classroom language interactions between English teachers and their students builds on the basic concepts of language function and language sequence. The four language functions are eliciting, informing, directing, and boundary marking (marking the divisions of discourse units). The three language…

A useful device in revising technical reports is the metaphor of entropy, which refers to the amount of disorder that is present in a system. Applied to communication theory, high entropy would correspond to increased amounts of unfamiliar or useless information in a text. Since entropy in rhetorical systems increases with the unfamiliarity of…

A study investigated the separate and combined effects of the syntactic organization of the sentence, the contextual framework in which a message is embedded, and the readers' past experiences on children's inferential reading comprehension of pragmatic cause/effect statements. The subjects, 144 fourth grade students, were asked to specify the…

This report considers some of the expectations, conventions, and strategies relied upon by Anglo children when they are participating in the speech event of storytelling, with particular focus on the children's interweaving of narrational and metanarrational speech. The data were obtained from white middle-class schoolchildren, aged six through…

A study was conducted to determine the effects of sentence length, sentence structure, and word frequency on the readability of textbook prose. Specifically, the study assessed the extent to which the factors, taken alone or in combination, affected the readability of two 1,000-word college textbook passages when the content remained the same. Two…

The spontaneous speech of a Mohawk-speaking boy was recorded from age 2;10 to 4;1. Analysis of this speech indicated that certain verbal prefixes are acquired earlier than suffixes. The pronominal prefix of nouns, on the other hand, enters late. Yet, before the appearance of any nominal affix, the child already uses a pronominal possessive as a…

Boaventura De Sousa Santos, a Portuguese law professor, appears to be the first legal scholar and theorist who works with rhetorical theories and who is accepted by the legal profession. Santos's major works have centered on the legal system of Pasargada, a Brazilian favela (squatter village) whose residents try to settle disputes outside the…

Formulae in composition can be derived and applied through a three-part process: first, analyzing passages and deriving formulae; second, writing sentences from formulae; and third, writing a composition using only sentences derivable from the formulae. Student participation in all three parts provides better motivation and demonstrates to…