This study investigates the extent to which beginning to advanced students of English as a second language (ESL) understand antecedent/anaphora relationships in written discourse. The findings are related to previous research on anaphoric reference in first and second language contexts, emphasizing the significance of this factor in measurement of…

The entire process of legal writing would be shorter and more effective if writers would give as much attention to the politics of the rhetorical situation as they do to legal research. To do that requires the following considerations: (1) understanding the three dramatic elements in the rhetorical situation (audience, purpose, tone); (2)…

There are 127 basic composition objectives in this revised collection for use in kindergarten through high school. At least one evaluation per objective is given. The objectives are organized as follows: (1) Story Writing which covers fanciful and realistic types such as: myths, fable, short story, fiction, and writing dialogue; (2) Letters both…

A study investigated the use of pronoun and demonstrative reference and ellipsis as cohesive devices in conversation between interlanguage-speaking parents, their children, and the children's classmates. The 24 subjects included eight Italian-, Greek-, and Macedonian-speaking migrant parents, their primary-school-age children, and the children's…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 20 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the campaign communication during the Carter-Ford television debates; (2) apprehensiveness and performance in public speaking; (3) a history and criticism of…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: children's development of syntactic aspects of reading comprehension, the relative contributions of the individual and the text in the comprehension and retention…

This review, based on a survey of more than 1200 items in the research literature, begins by attempting to outline a theory of language comprehension and learning from language. A lengthy chapter is devoted to problems in the measurement of comprehension and of learning from connected discourse. Also considered, in successive chapters, are the…

The teaching of dialect modification has been justified by the barrier postulate which says that lower class speech prevents upward social mobility. When translated into a testable hypothesis, the barrier assumption has not been confirmed. The movement called dialect modification did not arise from empirical research in social cognition, but…

The present study reports on exploratory research to determine whether the Aluminum Paragraph, a sentence-combining exercise developed by O'Donnell (Hunt, 1970) to measure the development of syntactic complexity in the writing of native speakers of English, can also serve as a measure of the active syntactic proficiency of learners of English as a…

This study examined the effects of an interactive approach called instructional conversations (IC) on the language and concept development of Hispanic students categorized as learning handicapped, by comparing traditional instruction (basal reading approach) with instructional conversations. Lessons were conducted with five limited English…

The idea that "natural speech" as well as written discourse can be organized is now commonly accepted. There is also evidence that natural speech contains more coherence indicators than written texts do. This article proposes that one type of organizer, pragmatic connectives such as "therefore, then, thus, while, however, but"…

A coding scheme developed by M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan was used in a study that investigated how students in grades 4, 6, and 8 developed meaning within narrative texts. Students, after being presented with a visual stimulus, were asked to describe what was happening and say what happened before and after the picture. Next, an oral assignment…

This paper examines the question of whether two labels should be used for the units traditionally called "sentence" and "clause" or whether the same label should be used and the units distinguished in some other way. Proponents of a two-level analysis have traditionally argued that sentences and clauses can have different…

This newsletter contains five articles. The first, "Discourse Structure in Reading," by Ron Shook, suggests that reading materials for the beginning ESL (English as a second language) reader often have three defects: (1) profusion of detail as question fodder; (2) an oversimplified syntax; and (3) an artificial construction that violates…

This report contains an extensive discussion of an approach to the study of discourse. Initial remarks concern arguments for studying discourse and approaches for discourse study that have been used; the author then discusses the relationship of discourse analysis and generative semantics. Language is considered on two issues: the decisions that a…