A selection of the papers from a symposium on the application of linguistic concepts to teaching composition are contained in this document. The papers and authors are as follows: "Introduction: Coherence, Composition, and Text Linguistics" (Nils Erik Enkvist); "TUAP and the Teaching of Writing in Sweden" (Lennart Bjork): "Discourse-Level…

Noting that the proliferation of discourse by and about the women's movement makes focus imperative in a bibliography dealing with feminism, this annotated bibliography concentrates on rhetorical analysis of American feminist rhetoric. The 42 cited items, most of which appeared in communication journals or were presented at communication…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The nine titles deal with the following topics: (1) the role and relationship of discourse and context; (2) political autonomy and accommodation to political alternatives as two major dimensions of political socialization; (3)…

A study was designed to assess the effect of text format on the decoding and comprehension proficiency of third and fifth grade students. Subjects were 36 students at each grade level who completed a battery of comprehension and decoding measures and then read a set of four stories that had been especially constructed for the study. Each story…

The reading recall protocols of 24 tenth grade and 24 twelfth grade students were used in a study that investigated the relationship of average reading ability and high school grade placement to recall of expository text with adversative and attributive structures. Two test passages were written in an adversative structure with contrasting…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 33 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) aphesis in English; (2) the linguistic representation of tone; (3) discourse structure and anaphora in written and conversational English; (4) a tagmemic…

This paper discusses the results of a study comparing the language of preschool children from low-income homes to that of their parents as affected by the adult participation in training sessions planned to encourage language development. The study was conducted in three preschools in the Detroit metropolitan area. A total of 96 children from ages…

This paper reviews the history of contrastive analysis (CA) against the background of its objectives and its present problems and presents an outline of procedures which seem to be necessary to make the methods meet the objectives of applied CA. CA in the United States was closely connected with structuralism, which was an obvious cause for later…

Contrastive analysis is viewed as an interlinguistic, bidirectional phenomenon which is concerned with both the form and function of language. As such, contrastive analysis must view language psycholinguistically and sociolinguistically as a system to be both described and acquired. Due to the need for a psychological component in the analysis,…

Data on one aspect of a year-long sociolinguistic study of participant perspectives of classroom discourse are presented in this final report. Second-, third-, and fourth-grade pupils in a lower socioeconomic, mutiethnic elementary school viewed videotapes of language arts lessons given earlier in the day. Each videotape was presented in three…

Part of a year-long sociolinguistic study of teacher and pupil perceptions of classroom discourse, this study presents data on pupil perceptions of discourse in play settings. Subjects were 165 pupils from six second, third, and fourth grade classrooms in a lower socioeconomic, multiethnic elementary school. In each of the six classrooms six…

A study was conducted to determine whether and how children with diverse cultural backgrounds, including the cultural mainstream in North America, might differentially identify and acquire rules of discourse appropriate to becoming literate. This study examined the natural language used by teacher and students recorded within selected periods of…

This paper discusses three linguistic theories related to communicative competence and English for special purposes in terms of the needs of post-graduate students in Guyarti, India. First, Hymes' theory of communicative competence is understood to be advocating a wider concept of competence than Chomsky's theory. Hymes states that a normal child…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with the following topics: (1) the adolescent writer's developing sense of audience; (2) the entry skills, methods, and attitudes of intermediate composition students in postsecondary composition programs; (3)…

Communication as a language-learning goal is legitimate, but it is claimed that some of the situational and functional techniques in pursuit of that goal are not. The value of most of the practice techniques generally used in second language classes is also questioned. In their place, a process of learner-centered analyses and communication…