This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 14 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) metaphor as argument in editorial cartoons, (2) conversational arguments, (3) message retention under threat of speech performance, (4) dominance and hostility…

A project designed to gather information about similarities and differences that may be important for teaching English to Finnish learners, and, to a certain extent, for teaching Finnish through English, was conducted through a systematic comparison of the two languages and an analysis of instances where the two languages come into contact. In the…

To investigate the strategies children use in comprehending written stories, third, sixth, and ninth grade students were given scrambled six-sentence stories and asked to reorder them. Three versions of each of six stories were created. The first version was the canonical form of the story predicted by story grammar rules; the second version began…

A number of common procedures underlie speaking, writing, listening, and reading; some students acquire these through exposure while others do not. A program for the teaching of procedures will differ from many conventional programs in that it will first identify and recognize these procedures. Abstract and complex prose and issues of…

To assist language researchers in their analysis of interlanguage, some values for the linguistic variables of Source Language (SL), Interlanguage (IL), and Target Language (TL) are set forth. Although the fundamental assumption underlying interlanguage research is that interlanguages are linguistic systems, it is difficult to describe the…

A study was undertaken to investigate the nature of the cohesive features found in the language of selected first grade students and to study and compare the cohesive features of language samples in the beginning level of three widely used reading series to those found in the language of the children for whom they are intended. In the first part…

The study analyzes communicative interaction in an informal social setting, investigating how the social task of leave-taking organizes the interaction into a cohesive discourse. Data is taken from the last five minutes of a half-hour tape recording made during a Mexican-American family's Christmas gathering, when one group of guests prepares for…

The Spanish tense system was chosen as a starting point to establish the systematic character of the Spanish used in situations of intense code switching between Spanish and English. The tense system was chosen for two reasons: (1) the distinction among past tenses (in particular, the imperfect indicative vs. the preterite and the past continuous)…

A review of research on "incomplete text," which refers to a variety of adaptations of cloze procedures, illustrates how construct validity has been considered and will need to be considered in future research on the subject. Much of the early research on incomplete text focused on product--providing quantitative assessments of…

This paper specifies the assessment of those general discourse skills that are needed for effective writing by students in grades one through six. The general discourse skills include planning/organizing, elaborating, proofreading, and editing. An introductory section provides background materials, including explanations of how the skill…

Investigators wrote proposals for research on the nature and learning of communicative processes in the elementary classroom. Three questions were addressed: (1) What is the nature of communication in the classroom? (2) How do students acquire the rules of classroom discourse? (3) What is the effect of inadequate learning of classroom discourse…

The Intellectual Framework Analysis (IFA) is a structured approach to reading expository prose. Suitable for use with high school students and college freshmen, the IFA consists of a number of questions concerning the author's subject matter, classifications, value judgments, motivation, and form/content. The IFA incorporates a number of study…

Noam Chomsky's transformational-generative grammar model may effectively be translated into an equivalent computer model. Phrase-structure rules and transformations are tested as to their validity and ordering by the computer via the process of random lexical substitution. Errors appearing in the grammar are detected and rectified, and formal…

This book discusses some of the functions, ends, or goals that language serves in religion; the various kinds of linguistic resources that are exploited; and some of the social processes that characterize the use of language. In section one, "Performance," three approaches to the description of verbal behavior are contrasted. This…

Up to the present, no studies have been done in the area of child language in Mexico. The Center of Linguistic and Literary Studies of the Colegio de Mexico carried out an empirical investigation of the language of six- to seven-year-old Mexican children. This paper presents, in preliminary form, some partial results of the investigation,…