Suggests that children's use of social scripts for the production of sustained dialog in peer interaction depends on the nature of role play and that their attempts at script expansion are precursors to adults' recognition of the potential of conversation for self-expression. (FL)

Investigated two methods of segmenting text based upon phrase boundaries in an attempt to make social studies textbooks more readable for elementary school students. Concludes that phrasing the passages for students improved their reading comprehension by approximately one grade level. (FL)

Reports on research that reviewed 142 current middle and secondary school content materials to discover the organizational patterns used in each. Concludes that four such patterns are commonly used: enumeration, relationship, persuasive, and problem solving. Discusses each pattern and how it affects comprehension. (FL)

Concludes that children could attend to texts selectively when reading or listening to expository prose, and when reading, but not in listening to narrative prose. (FL)

The sentence structure in 64 academic journals representing the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering was examined to determine (1) what structures are common to all academic writing, (2) the range of variation within academic writing, and (3) the extent to which sentence structure differs in the academic areas. (HOD)

Using the "top-down" view of reading as a communication act, this article describes how "stories within stories," stories with real and implied authors and narrators, create a very complex communication situation. (HTH)

Describes a method to improve student comprehension of content area materials that involves three distinct readings, each followed by a progressively more detailed graphic overview of the content. (HTH)

Explores the resources of television broadcasts for language instruction, particularly when they provide authentic models for the acquisition of communication skills illustrating the functional aspects of language, discourse strategies, and extralinguistic components of a situation. (MES)

Defines the concepts underlying the semiotics of written texts and emphasizes the distinction between literary production (discourse) and technical writing (message), the former stressing the poetic and expressive functions, the latter the referential function. Describes the language of "messages" as based on unambiguous terms that reflect the…

The relationship between writing and reading linking prescriptive and contrastive rhetoric, textual discourse analysis, ESP text research, and psycholinguistics and reading is examined. The chief axioms stressed for writers are planning and using discourse devices. How these can be translated into reading strategies is demonstrated. (PMJ)

Examines the relationship between syntactic complexity and quality ratings of narrative and argumentative writing of students in grades 6, 10, and 12. (HOD)

Suggests, based on observations of children in a nursery school drawing activity, that what children understand about drawing is intimately tied to what they know of drawing activities undertaken in a particular social context. (FL)

Investigates the relationship of reading ability and age to children's recall of expository text after reading and analyzes children's sensitivity to text structure. (MKM)

A schema-based framework for representing knowledge and prose organization was studied. Testing of a script pointer and tag hypothesis confirmed that memory discrimination is better for atypical actions in a passage than for typical script actions and that there is no memory discrimination for very typical actions. (SW)

The four parts in this section present: (1) an advertisement based on the literary style of Emile Zola; (2) exercises designed to practice expressions of similarity and difference; (3) the transcript of a discussion on the problem of swamps; and (4) variations on the shopkeeper-customer dialogue. (AM)