While the chapters of this book present a variety of perspectives, they share the common goal of redirecting and revitalizing research on written composition. The authors review research on written discourse and the composing process and raise questions regarding information and skills that teachers and researchers need to consider. The chapters…

A "generative stylistics" approach to writing presents usable, conscious standards for the production, arrangement, and rearrangement of written discourse thereby teaching students how to make appropriate decisions about language usage. Based on research studies that indicate the dependence of the writing process on the decision making…

Turn-taking in language classroom discourse is analyzed in order to discover patterns of instructional teacher-pupil exchange. It is concluded that traditional modes of second language instruction (especially in English as a second language) tend to stifle student initiative. Since students rarely have the opportunity to open an exchange, it is…

Previous interpretations of male/female discourse were examined in light of new data generated from a study of intercultural mixed-sex dyads. Eleven dyads, each consisting of a Chinese and an American subject, were videotaped in 30-minute conversations about courtship in different cultures. The tapes were content analyzed to obtain information on…

Language studies examining the language-thought relationship are important as are those that study other psychological factors concerned with the storage of knowledge. Since language is a product of the social process, it is important to consider that the meaning intended by the sender of the message (author) may not be the meaning decoded by the…

One hundred eleventh and twelfth grade students were grouped according to their knowledge of and interest in baseball and were then tested for their recall of information presented with varying levels and amounts of background information and analogy. The information was presented in the following ways: (1) analogy embedded in text, (2) analogy…

Dictations are not sufficient as exercises for developing listening comprehension skills. Other techniques and exercises which have been used in English for Special Purposes classes include practice in note taking, cloze-testing on lectures, mock formal interviews and informal conversations, and discourse analyses of sample lectures. Such analyses…

This paper reports some results from a study sponsored by the Office of Naval Research that has focused on identifying sources of reading disability in young adults. Separate sections of the paper describe experiments conducted to investigate three sets of component processes--word analysis processes, integrative processes, and discourse analysis…

The development of alternative instructional activities for use in the basic writing classroom and a description and analysis of four levels of basic writing are the results of a study of basic writing teaching techniques. The linguistic concepts of immediate and transferred utterances and nominal-verbal pairing, and the work of L. Vygotsky on…

Conversations between adult students of English as a second language were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed in order to establish principles of extralinguistic conversational repair technique among second language learners. A variety of gestural and kinesic features were discovered; these are described in detail and their use is contextualized…

A LINGUISTIC MODEL OF HUMAN LANGUAGE MUST ACCOUNT FOR BOTH "SENTENCES" AND "MEANINGS" AS WELL AS EXPLAIN HOW SPEAKERS ARE ABLE TO TRANSLATE SENTENCES INTO MEANINGS AND VICE VERSA. THE AUTHOR DOUBTS THAT THE RULES OF A TRANSFORMATIONAL GENERATIVE GRAMMAR WILL BE ABLE TO CONSTRUCT A TRANSDUCER CAPABLE OF TRANSLATING MEANINGS INTO…

Several types of narrative errors are discussed that were found in the course of an analysis of stories collected in casual settings from a number of American speakers in undirected conversation. The approach to the question of error correction is sociocultural; the emphasis is on the motivation for the error correction. This paper explores the…

A study of non-native children's acquisition of communicative competence examined the child's construction of rules of conversation in the second language. The linguistic devices that children use to link up their utterances with those of another speaker, i.e., cohesion-creating devices that create textual unity, were focused upon. Repetition, one…

Linguistic research has paid little attention to "fillers." These so-called "hesitation forms" can be classified as being either "buffers" or "back channel elicitors," the former being self-primers, and the latter being other-directed. These forms are difficult to distinguish without access to kinesic and…

The purpose of this study was to test the implication that ethnic stereotyping may bias a teacher's perception of a child's speech. The subjects, 44 undergraduate education majors, were asked to view three 90-second segments of video tape showing fifth and sixth grade boys from three ethnic groups--Black, Mexican-American, and Anglo--and were…