To analyze the process involved in maintaining conversational coherency, the study described in this paper used a construct called a "context space" that grouped utterances referring to a single issue or episode. The paper defines the types of context spaces, parses individual conversations to identify the underlying model or structure,…

This study investigates why researchers have trouble determining when learners acquire inverted and statement forms of yes/no questions. Researchers have difficulty designing studies on this subject because this area of language is not fully rule-governed or systematic. The choice of the form may be based on two speakers' foreknowledge of each…

A dialectical heuristic that can be used to guide students through the stages of writing about a literary experience is discussed in this paper. The first section of the paper provides a working definition of literature as an area of discourse and divides the process of reading and writing about literature into three general phases: progressive,…

Sixty undergraduate students read and summarized eight short passages in a study of how semantic components were involved in text comprehension. After the first summary was completed (the naive or untutored summary), the students were assigned to one of three groups. The experimental group was introduced to the semantic components, including…

A three-way mixed factorial design was used in a study of the ways good and poor readers used context in cloze tasks. Reading ability (good versus poor readers) and booklet format (sentence versus sentence fragment presentation) served as between-subject factors, while context (whole versus partial passage) served as a within-subject factor.…

Essays in which 40 freshman composition students described unusual or extraordinary persons were analyzed for the charcteristic choices that males and females made and for the typical ways men and women were described. The analysis yielded seven findings with social implications. Both males and females tended to choose males as objects for…

One factor that contributes to the difficulty that a reader may encounter when reading a text is the syntactic complexity of the constructions used in the text. Examples of altered text constructions include the transformations of subjects of subordinate clauses, making them either the subjects or the objects of main clauses. When the conditions…

The effectiveness of previewing versus discourse analysis as methods of reading instruction was tested. Previewing (supported by schema theory) was based on the premise that helping students relate their knowledge to the content of a reading selection would facilitate comprehension. Discourse analysis (based on research on text structures)…

The study described in this paper illustrates how key features of rhetorical analysis can be operationalized to apply to the study of therapeutic transactions. After a discussion of psychotherapy as an influence process, the paper describes the methodology used in an analysis of tape-recorded discourse between three therapist/client dyads in an…

Dynamics of discussion in the classroom are analyzed based on data from 64 classrooms in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. Among the discourse problems considered are the separation of answers from questions, the relationship between the presupposition of an utterance and the speaker/hearer assumptions, and the relationship between utterance form and…

Coherence and cohesion are fundamental considerations of the composing process that help to define the global and local components of texuality. Global text coherence centers on those aspects of the familiar rhetorical situation. Coherence operates at the paragraph and essay levels, answering questions about focus, tone, mode, topic, and thesis.…

An analysis of questioning strategies considers the kinds of responses that can be made to a question (different kinds of questions and their customary responses, and different kinds of response to the same kind of question). Additionally, the advantages/disadvantages to the use of the reproduction criterion in a sociological study are assessed.…

This report contains brief descriptions of 37 published and unpublished works and ongoing studies produced by a project designed to investigate the ways in which both children and adults comprehend and remember connected discourse. Among the topics of the published works, which include articles, book chapters, and a book, are the following: story…

Word identification latencies and word prediction accuracy were compared for groups of skilled and less skilled fifth grade readers in three experiments. In each experiment, discourse context reduced identification latencies for less skilled as well as skilled readers. This was true both when context was heard and when it was read. The general…

A study investigated whether children could be sensitized to structural aspects of narratives and whether reading comprehension could be enhanced through instruction designed to develop concept of story. Twenty fourth grade students with a poorly developed concept of story were assigned to either a control or an experimental group. The…