Defines concession and suggests eight criteria which may be used when producing materials designed to practice the use of connectives such as "although" to express concession in English. These criteria include materials, which reflect typically unexpected consequences and a culturally familiar world, and practice, which goes beyond the…

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)

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)

This study of a 5-year-old girl with sensorineural hearing loss examined the effect of supplementing a pragmatically based procedure of focused stimulation with structured opportunities for verbal practice using vertical constructions. Results indicated that focused stimulation was an effective treatment procedure, especially when enhanced by the…

The conversations of 10 deaf children (ages 10-12) and their families at dinnertime were examined, and spoken and signed verbal exchanges were documented. Results showed that deaf children responded more loquaciously to questions than they did to statements or expressions of ideas, and the children were unsuccessful in continuing topics of…

The aim of this study was to gain insight into the extent to which health education text writers apply writing principles derived from cognitive psychological theory. Seventeen professional text writers of health education materials participated in a qualitative study, consisting of a rewriting task combined with a think-aloud procedure and a…

Impromptu speech can be defined in different ways: in terms of situational context, linguistic characteristics, and real-time processing. These approaches are not contradictory. There are certain situations that call for rapid processing of spoken discourse, and the needs of that processing are reflected in the structure of the text. The degree of…

Seventy good readers and 70 poor readers who were students at a community college participated in a study that examined the role of adversative connectives in helping students integrate information across sentence boundaries. Three functions of adversative connectives were examined: contrast or conflict, parallel points, and foregrounding…

Good and poor explanatory essays of 40 college freshmen were analyzed for 18 cohesive ties and chains to determine the appropriateness of the cohesion system for teaching and evaluating writing. The questions that were specifically addressed were, (1) How do writers use the cohesive resources of the language? and (2) How is cohesion related to…

This paper describes a classroom game designed to help students overcome their fear of writing. Two classes of top- and middle-ability adolescents were divided into pairs to work on a single composition. After the teacher proposed the initial sentence, the partners took turns writing sentences to complete the story. Although the collaborative…

It was hypothesized that writers of sentence pairs with clear relationships would have better recall of second sentences than would writers of sentence pairs with unclear relationships. Clear connections between sentences in sentence pairs were defined as those sentences in which the language of the first sentence was explicitly picked up in the…

The descriptive contents (cognitive meanings) of the modals "can,""may,""could,""might,""must,""need,""ought,""should," compared with paraphrastic verbs and adjectives, motivate two cross-classifying dimensions: logical modality (possibility, impossibility, necessity)…

Comprehension is a process that occurs within the reader and is at least partially dependent on cohesion and coherence. The concept of cohesion is used to show how sentences which are structurally independent of one another may be linked together. Cohesion exists within a text and is not the same as coherence, which is something the reader…

This book, a pedagogical rather than a scientific study of the French and English sound systems, is specifically designed for the French-Canadian student of English. Together with its companion volumes, "Teaching English Pronunciation: Exercises, Part 1 and Part 2," and their accompanying phonograph records, the series may be used separately or as…

The process of constructing connected discourse varies just as language structure itself varies from one language to another. Different languages combine thoughts in different ways. For the advanced level student of English as a second language, composition instruction is a critical area and should not be left to the typical freshman composition…