Investigates whether frequent story retellings with structural guidance can improve kindergarten children's use of structural elements and increase the oral language complexity in dictating original stories. Finds support for retelling as an instructional strategy. (RS)

This article explores the connections between conversation demands and the ability of children who stutter to maintain fluency. A model of conversation management useful both in assessment and intervention is introduced. The three-component model considers competencies at the utterance level, suprasegmental level, and discourse level. (Author/JDD)

Describes a set of metadiscourse functions arising from the use of contrastive and non-contrastive expressions in academic argumentation. Describes interpersonal metadiscourse functions of connectives within argumentative essays. Proposes that interpersonal uses of connectives mitigate counterclaims and emphasize claims based on the assumed roles…

This paper offers a rationale for the use of conversational approaches to teach language to deaf students, encourages teachers to reexamine how they teach and how they structure their classrooms and curriculums, and describes activities that teachers can use to encourage conversation in their classrooms. (Author/JDD)

This article compares ordinary conversational topics and targeted second language (L2) forms for their effectiveness in building and maintaining classroom discourse cohesion. In this study, 16 learners participated in 2 lessons, 1 with teacher turns determined by a grammatical object of instruction, and the other with turns determined by…

A group with closed head injury was compared to neurologically intact controls regarding the referential cohesion and logical coherence of narrative production. A sample of six stories was obtained with tasks of cartoon-elicited story-telling and auditory-oral retelling. We found deficits in the clinical group with respect to referential cohesion,…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between working memory and text coherence in Chinese text comprehension. Eighty-six participants completed an operation-character working memory span task to be classified into low-span and high-span readers and a reading task to measure the time to detect inconsistency as well as the…

The authors investigated the extent to which classroom pedagogical practices and disciplinary course focus contributed to understandings of social justice outcomes among 406 undergraduate students enrolled in five college courses. They found that gender, enrollment in Intergroup Dialogue, service-learning, Introduction to Sociology courses, and…

A review of the relevant literature reveals that reading reversals, whether in sequence or orientation, comprise a very small proportion of the total errors made by even poor readers. Young children tend to make more reversals, yet this tendency generally disappears with age. Top-down theorists feel that the reversal tendency of young children is…

To explore the concept of lexical collocation, or relationships between words, a study was conducted based on three assumptions: (1) that a text structure for a unit of discourse was analogous to that existing at the level of the sentence, (2) that such a text form could be discovered if a large enough sample of generically similar texts was…

Sentence-by-sentence analysis of factual or propositional cohesion in the first 29 lines of a Swedish children's story finds several sources of coherence that contribute to its cohesion. First, the text receives much coherence from its description of a single event, a situation where happenings are normal and expected. Second, a rather primitive…

Based on the theory that a story's coherence depends directly on the causal cohesiveness of the story's individual events, this paper describes (1) a process by which readers use causal reasoning to connect events, (2) what memory representations result from this reasoning, and (3) the implications of test data on causal reasoning. Following a…

In a study conducted to show the importance of sentence connections as a way of looking at a writer's cognitive processes, three devices used to achieve coherence in written discourse were compared and proved to be unequally effective. The devices were cohesion (use of a textual reference in a sentence that has an antecedent in a preceding…

Children's early writing is analyzed in this paper according to different perspectives such as function, grapho-phonemics, syntax, and semantics. Emphasis is given to the semantic perspective of decoding the text and to the study of coherence in text as it is viewed by the reader. Proposition analysis is used to map the coherence of samples of…

This two-part volume (also published separately as "Let's Write English, Book 1," and "Let's Write English, Book 2") is designed to carry the non-native speaker of English from the beginning stages of writing English to "full competence in fullfilling the writing requirements in university and professional life." The…