This series, designed for use in inservice teacher workshops, addresses the question, "How do children and teachers use language to get things done?" The transcribed classroom discourse presented and discussed in each volume illustrates functional language in a real context based on the videotaping of undoctored classroom events from…

Excerpts from articles in the "British Medical Journal" and "The American Journal of Medicine" were compared to determine which journal was easier to read and what stylistic traits might account for such ease. Nine paragraphs from the discussion sections of articles on hypertension were taken from each of the journals. When…

Two issues in language development are explored--the emergence of the ability to communicate and the relationship between emerging forms and functions. Solutions to these problems involve the notion of interpretation and depend on the fact that adults interpret children's behaviors as if they were meaningful according to the adult system. The…

Three passages of fifth-grade readability were read and recalled by 24 high- and low-ability fifth graders and college students. These passages were characterized as either narrative (high degree of temporal linkage), expository (logical linkage and abstract content), or mixed (logical linkage but with content suggestive of a narrative). The…

An investigation was conducted to ascertain the effects of the structured overview on both the short-term and long-term comprehension of average and below average readers. The subjects were 143 college students classified as average or below average readers and randomly assigned to either a structured overview (65) or a control group (78). Both…

The essays in this book focus on the role of the reader in textual interpretation. Specifically, they examine "open" and "closed" texts. The three essays in Part I deal with both verbal and nonverbal texts. The first considers musical compositions that leave considerable autonomy to the individual performer and also discusses…

Sentence combining (SC) has proved to be valuable in increasing the syntactic maturity of students. However, teachers have felt uncomfortable with the arhetorical nature of SC. Little research has been done on the relation of cognitive processes and SC. SC might be more useful if account is taken of the fact that syntax is an abode for cognitive…

Discourse analysis, a field that reflects an interest in language as text and social interaction, is discussed. Discourse analysis deals with the way language varies from one communicative situation to another; textological analysis deals with the internal organization of such discourse in terms of grammar and vocabulary. Assumptions in…

To analyze the process involved in maintaining conversational coherency, the study described in this paper used a construct called a "context space" that grouped utterances referring to a single issue or episode. The paper defines the types of context spaces, parses individual conversations to identify the underlying model or structure,…

This study investigates why researchers have trouble determining when learners acquire inverted and statement forms of yes/no questions. Researchers have difficulty designing studies on this subject because this area of language is not fully rule-governed or systematic. The choice of the form may be based on two speakers' foreknowledge of each…

A dialectical heuristic that can be used to guide students through the stages of writing about a literary experience is discussed in this paper. The first section of the paper provides a working definition of literature as an area of discourse and divides the process of reading and writing about literature into three general phases: progressive,…

Sixty undergraduate students read and summarized eight short passages in a study of how semantic components were involved in text comprehension. After the first summary was completed (the naive or untutored summary), the students were assigned to one of three groups. The experimental group was introduced to the semantic components, including…

A three-way mixed factorial design was used in a study of the ways good and poor readers used context in cloze tasks. Reading ability (good versus poor readers) and booklet format (sentence versus sentence fragment presentation) served as between-subject factors, while context (whole versus partial passage) served as a within-subject factor.…

Essays in which 40 freshman composition students described unusual or extraordinary persons were analyzed for the charcteristic choices that males and females made and for the typical ways men and women were described. The analysis yielded seven findings with social implications. Both males and females tended to choose males as objects for…

One factor that contributes to the difficulty that a reader may encounter when reading a text is the syntactic complexity of the constructions used in the text. Examples of altered text constructions include the transformations of subjects of subordinate clauses, making them either the subjects or the objects of main clauses. When the conditions…