Issues in illiteracy are discussed, and the author comments on facets of the English language writing system. He advocates a formal approach in which comprehension, rather than decoding, is the focus for students, including slow learners or disabled readers. The approach would concentrate on patterns larger than the letter-sound unit. (CL)

Discusses the use of the comma in Spanish and gives examples of its use in Spanish literature. (NCR)

Discusses the uses of the comma in Spanish and shows a poem that can be interpreted in different ways with different punctuation. (NCR)

Discusses the nature of legal discourse and demonstrates that an analysis of its intellectual structure reveals its distance from the voice of the people. (AM)

Discusses the meaning of the term "literature," surveying various definitions, and concentrating on the elements of "style" and "message". (AM)

Responds to an earlier essay that made claims about the origins of written language as the basis for advocating a particular method of teaching reading, clarifying: the origins of the alphabet, the "flimsy" nature of the alphabetic principle, and the implications of both for teaching reading. After examining the origins of written…

Responds to a critique of an earlier article on alphabetic writing that made claims about the origins of written language as the basis for advocating a particular method of teaching reading, suggesting that the critique actually supports the original article's position, and nothing in the critique justifies its conclusion that children need…

Trials an analysis of engineering reports using a modified version of Gosden's (1993) analysis of the science research article. Using Hallidayan sociolinguistic concepts, the analysis demonstrates how engineering writers linguistically convert real-world entities and processes into non-real-world concepts. The article also tracks authorial…

Genetic research has shown that dyslexia is familial, substantially heritable, and heterogeneous in its genetic mechanisms. Evidence also supports the view that the primary symptom in dyslexia is a deficit in the phonological coding of written language, a symptom that appears to be heritable. (Author/JDD)

Investigates the effect of drawing method on the subsequent discriminability of hand-drawn characters. Finds that members of character pairs drawn using dissimilar stroke directions became more differentiated; subjects were better able to distinguish between members of differentiated character pairs; and subjects were better at distinguishing…

Success in teaching deaf pupils to read has not increased in decades, but new conceptualizations of literacy, clear understanding that deafness is a human condition and not a deficit, and recent research on how deaf families accomplish what schools do not all point to better ways of teaching deaf children to read. (46 references) (Author/CB)

A framework for language planning categorizes 22 language planning goals in terms of the intersections between 3 types (status, corpus, and acquisition) and 2 approaches (policy and cultivation) of language planning. The model helps literacy developers to answer the question of which literacies to develop for what purpose. (Contains 44…

Explains that semiology provides a broad perspective for analyzing the range of signs, their differences in form and function, along with the relative efficiency of different signs for different purposes and situations. Applies some general semiological notions to the printed page. (SR)

Introduces two systems that increase the information density of textual presentation by reconsidering text as pictures, expanding the range of written expression. Notes that these systems are implemented as computer programs, active filters that represent textual information graphically. (SR)

Discusses the writing of literary works in languages other than English in the United States with a a particular focus on authors who write in Italian. Asks whether it is possible to talk about multiculturalism in the United States without multilingualism and whether or not texts written in languages other than English can be part of the American…