This paper explores the emergent and polyphonic character of voice in adolescent writing. It proposes a model, derived from M. M. Bakhtin's work on discourse, to account for how adolescent writers borrow voices from various speech communities and communication domains and combine them in complex overt and covert ways in order to construct their…

Helen Forbes, in her short story "The Hunky Woman," written in 1916 for "The Masses," an eclectic Socialist magazine, undermines particular categorical propositions. By using narration with a shifting of narrative voice, Forbes calls into question the validity of the traditional teaching of argumentation. Forbes demonstrates…

Addressing areas of conflict between parents and young children, this study reports the results of interviews with parents about parent/child conflict that occurs in such natural settings as the home, the supermarket, and during visits to grandparents. Specifically, the investigation is concerned with three broad issues: (1) the identification of…

This paper builds upon the poetics of scientific discourse which provide extraordinary insights into the workings of the scientific imagination and into the ways it is both colonized and liberated by the medium of social and ideological transfer--metaphor. The paper examines what constructivism is teaching us about the role metaphor plays in…

This study examined the verbal message strategies employed in the two 1988 presidential debates by Vice-President George Bush and Governor Michael Dukakis, independently and comparatively. A number of broad verbal categories were developed to code the messages of each candidate from videotapes and transcripts. Verbal characteristics under…

Three high-achieving and three low-achieving 4-year-olds attending prekindergarten at a private elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana were studied as they interacted with computers in dyads. Subject pairs were composed of one high- and one low-achiever and varied according to sex: boy/boy, boy/girl, and girl/girl. Qualitative methods of…

A discussion of the mechanism of totalitarian indoctrination institutionalized in the Romanian educational system focuses on verbal interaction in school and school-related situations before the revolution of December 1989. Pragmatic analysis of the political language used in a variety of academic contexts (political science, political education,…

A discussion of the teaching of scientific discourse to non-native speakers focuses on two areas: (1) characteristics commonly attributed to scientific language and their implications; and (2) the difficulties experienced at the language-teaching level in teaching theoretical discourse. It is commonly assumed that scientific discourse is…

An ethnographic approach is taken to describe the development of student critical thinking in the Pittsburgh Discussion Project, focusing primarily on discussion experiences in three classes (one college-bound 9th-grade class and two mainstream 11th-grade classes) over the school year. Weekly discussions were audiotaped, and interviews were…

A study investigated the relationship between reading achievement and predictive abilities for narrative text structure of 96 fourth grade and 70 sixth grade readers. The subjects (1) silently read incomplete stories and then told the rest orally, and (2) silently read stories that had parts deleted and then orally gave information they thought…

Divided into two phases, a study investigated the differential effects of text with and without logical connectives on college developmental readers' comprehension. In the first phase, 44 sophomores from two sections of a college developmental reading course were administered a cloze comprehension exercise along with a class of 50 regular…

A study explored the thoughts people have as they interact with others in conversation. Individuals were asked to communicate with each other over networked microcomputers and as they typed their messages, they spoke aloud their thoughts about the exchanges. These oral protocols, matched with the messages exchanged over the network, were then…

A study explored the relationship between personal narratives and their contexts by developing an analytical framework and applying it to the personal narratives told by guests on "The Tonight Show" and "Late Night with David Letterman." Three episodes of each program, containing a total of 22 personal narratives, were…

The extensive use of clausal embedding in legal language is examined. The extent and depth of left-branching, nested, and right- branching clauses in the 1972 British Road Traffic Act are also studied. The complexity of the resulting constructions, and the problems created for comprehension are described. The analysis reveals complex sequences of…

Academic discourse, which takes its definitive characteristics from the papers written by professors to those in a particular discipline for the purpose of solving problems or furthering knowledge, is sustained by disciplinary rhetorical exigencies that prompt, shape, and convene an audience for such writing. The phrase "rhetorical…