An evaluative review of Francis Christensen's generative rhetoric theory and its application to teaching freshman composition. (DS)

...the main functions of certain texts are set out here, and these provide some definite objective in the teaching of structures for the teacher of English who has to deal with technical students." Part 1 appeared in English Language Teaching" v24 n2 p120-124, January 1970. (FB)

Revision of a paper presented at meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (Minneapolis, Minn., April 1968).

Supports the hypothesis that children are able to comprehend embedded sentences with semantic constraints at an earlier age than they can understand embedded sentences without such constraints. Subjects were 161 children ranging in age from 5 years to 14 years, 11 months. (Author/RH)

It is proposed that the concepts of location and goal are helpful instructional tools in Russian, encouraging competence and discouraging incorrect analyses of sentence structure. Minor reorganization of conventional instructional materials and addition of a few sentences for discussion would be of significant assistance in student understanding.…

Suggests teaching a variety of sentence beginnings in writing instruction. (AEA)

Two experiments indicated that sentence verification times were significantly longer when a discrepancy between target sentence and context was in the syntactic presupposition, rather than in the assertion. Findings are best explained by a structural hypothesis, not by strategies designed to locate given and new information. (Author/CP)

Investigated five-year-olds' abilities to determine the reference of anaphoric pronouns. Children had difficulty when a sentence contained more than one pronoun, especially when assigning the reference of a pronoun requiring an inference. The children's difficulties stemmed from forgetting premise information and from having problems in carrying…

Discusses the ellipsis of major sentential elements as a pervasive grammatical phenomenon in Japanese conversation and demonstrates its relevance for current theories of discourse or text analysis. (FL)

The effects of manipulating the connective words "because" and "after" on fifth graders' reading comprehension was examined. The results provide no support for the notion that sentence length is related to comprehensibility or that implicit connectives are more difficult to comprehend. (HOD)

Strategies for sentence comprehension by a group of 18 severely retarded children were compared to those of a group of nonretarded children matched on mental age. Among the results was the finding that the retarded children tended to rely more on semantic expectations than did the nonretarded children. (PHR)

Reports on an investigation of the surface forms used by mothers to direct their children's behavior, and of the ways in which these forms are modified as the children grow older and their comprehension of indirect speech acts increases. (AM)

Two experiments examined the role of presupposed (or old) and focal (or new) information in integrating sentences, by measuring comprehension time for various combinations of presupposed and focal information. (Author/AM)

Preschool children aged 2.6 to 5.0 were presented with reversible active and passive sentences in four comprehension test settings. The children's response patterns were analyzed in terms of individual response patterns. Extralinguistic cues accounted for the most common patterns. (Author/AM)