The effectiveness of previewing versus discourse analysis as methods of reading instruction was tested. Previewing (supported by schema theory) was based on the premise that helping students relate their knowledge to the content of a reading selection would facilitate comprehension. Discourse analysis (based on research on text structures)…

The study described in this paper illustrates how key features of rhetorical analysis can be operationalized to apply to the study of therapeutic transactions. After a discussion of psychotherapy as an influence process, the paper describes the methodology used in an analysis of tape-recorded discourse between three therapist/client dyads in an…

Dynamics of discussion in the classroom are analyzed based on data from 64 classrooms in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. Among the discourse problems considered are the separation of answers from questions, the relationship between the presupposition of an utterance and the speaker/hearer assumptions, and the relationship between utterance form and…

Coherence and cohesion are fundamental considerations of the composing process that help to define the global and local components of texuality. Global text coherence centers on those aspects of the familiar rhetorical situation. Coherence operates at the paragraph and essay levels, answering questions about focus, tone, mode, topic, and thesis.…

An analysis of questioning strategies considers the kinds of responses that can be made to a question (different kinds of questions and their customary responses, and different kinds of response to the same kind of question). Additionally, the advantages/disadvantages to the use of the reproduction criterion in a sociological study are assessed.…

This report contains brief descriptions of 37 published and unpublished works and ongoing studies produced by a project designed to investigate the ways in which both children and adults comprehend and remember connected discourse. Among the topics of the published works, which include articles, book chapters, and a book, are the following: story…

Word identification latencies and word prediction accuracy were compared for groups of skilled and less skilled fifth grade readers in three experiments. In each experiment, discourse context reduced identification latencies for less skilled as well as skilled readers. This was true both when context was heard and when it was read. The general…

A study investigated whether children could be sensitized to structural aspects of narratives and whether reading comprehension could be enhanced through instruction designed to develop concept of story. Twenty fourth grade students with a poorly developed concept of story were assigned to either a control or an experimental group. The…

Data from videotaped conversations in a number of East African languages and in English are used to establish the existence of a preference in the African interactional systems for the use of verbal feedback by listeners in contrast to a preference for the use of non-verbal (gaze, head nod) feedback in English. This difference is related to…

In a verbal memory study of language development, third- through sixth-grade children read and orally recalled short, expository passages which were presented in three syntactic paraphrase forms: (1) complex sentences with preverbal elaboration such as complex subject nominalizations and relative clauses, (2) complex sentences with postverbal…

A method was developed for characterizing and comparing the semantic content of picture-text combinations used as stimuli in research on reading procedural instructions. The written directions for assembling a toy model were analyzed, and sets of propositions in the instructions were constructed using C. H. Frederiksen's discourse analysis model.…

The persuasive writings of 14 teacher education students considered to be exemplary writers were examined to determine what variations occurred across topics and across writers. The stability of the T-unit (the main clause and all its subordinate clauses) as an indicator of writing ability was also tested. All the subjects wrote compositions on…

An important feature of the sentence in any language is its thematic structure, new/given information organization. It has been found that in English, where word order is grammatically determined, the thematic structure is signalled by the place of the sentence stress. If an indefinite noun (new information) is present in the sentence, it bears…

A listener's inferences about why speakers say what they do can influence what the listener remembers. Psychologists studying memory for discourse have neglected to give attention to the source of the information to be remembered. In a study to determine what effects adding information has on remembering initial discourse, subjects listening to…

This experiment tested the hypothesis that stimulation in a given mode of discourse (e.g., the argumentative, or "A", mode of theme writing) will improve the quality of compositions written in that mode, but decrease the quality in another mode (e.g., the descriptive, or "D", mode). Ninety first-graders were required to write two themes in the "D"…