This study compared 15 classes of freshman composition taught by the Aims approach, which stresses the different expressive, literary, persuasive, exploratory, scientific, and informative aims of writing which govern the writer's choices relative to author, audience, subject matter, and language and 16 classes taught by a traditional Modes…

The society's and the school's obsessive avoidance of conflict and insistence that "there are two sides to every issue" deadens students to outrage and injustice. (JH)

Proposes an approach to effective communication instruction which avoids the use of techniques and instead emphasizes the linguistic, logical, psychological, and sociological analysis of discourse. (AM)

Authors present a critical, historical overview of research on second-language acquisition. Outlines four analytical approaches--contrastive, error, performance, and discourse analysis--traces the shifts among these approaches, and demonstrates the advantages and disadvantages of each. Also shows how the different approaches reflect changing…

Material comprising teachers' questions and pupils' responses was collected during ordinary lessons in order to gain an understanding of the linguistic interaction during lessons in the mother tongue. (Author/LMO)

Discusses the concept of politeness in language and its importance and implications in the foreign language classroom, covering interactional rules and competence, politeness as a social-psychological phenomenon, politeness as a learning goal and subject matter, and politeness in discourse. (CB)

Continuous discourse tracking, when used as a test of the effectiveness of aural rehabilitation strategies, has numerous uncontrolled variables related to the sender, the receiver, the text materials, and repeated presentations. Tracking is inappropriate for across-subject designs, and acceptable for within-subject test designs only when stringent…

Examines parents' level of education as a factor in readability of communications sent to parents. Concludes that a significant number of parents are unable to read these communications, and that readability and layout of materials should be prime considerations. (RS)

Reports on a study that examined the relationship between understanding of specific cohesive items and general reading comprehension ability, as well as differences in performance of girls and boys. Makes suggestions for the classroom based on the findings. (ARH)

Asserts that students who are aware of the generic background in their own writing will more easily develop a sense of genre when studying texts written by others. Presents three rhetorical goals--writing to instruct, writing to delight, and writing to motivate--and discusses how an awareness of these goals influences reading and writing. (MM)

Describes an approach to French literature that looks at the process of making a novel into a film. The technique focuses on comparisons of composition, characters, and language. (MSE)

Investigates the readability level of written materials (such as notices or newsletters) sent by six all-day kindergartens/child-parent centers to parents of disadvantaged children. Found that the readability of the materials ranged from sixth grade to higher than college level, and that the mean level was midtenth grade. (ARH)

Discusses five noun-related sentence level difficulties that first-year law students have in constructing feasible arguments for the courtroom. (MS)

Examines the structure of 100 pieces of nonnarrative writing composed by students in grades 1, 2, and 3. Analyzes the coherence in each of the pieces and the hierarchical ordering of information. Suggests the inadequacy of the term "expressive writing" to describe the initial writing done by students in the sample. (AEW)

Investigation of discourse structures in bilingual (German-English) families indicated that parents' discursive strategies were related to the children's acquisition of the minority language and that children were more likely to speak the minority language if the respective parent employed a more child-centered mode of interaction than the parent…