A study examined (1) developmental differences in the writing of urban students, (2) the syntactic complexity associated with differing modes of written discourse, and (3) the relationship among grade level, mode of discourse, and writing quality. Subjects were approximately 1,200 second, fifth, eighth, and eleventh grade students from large…

The promotion of literacy among minority groups depends in part upon educational and sociolinguistic discourse analysis. As a contribution to that effort, the present study provides data on the narrative in the language of Mexican-American adults by gathering and analyzing personal narratives produced in both English and Spanish. These narratives…

United States President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev have strongly emphasized in several speeches that their ultimate goal is peace between their respective nations. However, this apparent shared goal has not come about, largely because they lack a common understanding of the meaning of peace. Both have stated that they wish…

Interactional processes that lead to individual differences in children's communication styles and peer competence were explored in an examination of discourse and communication patterns used in parent-child and child-child interaction. Subjects were 38 children of 29-64 months in full-time day care and their mothers. Data was gathered through…

In order to teach anything, two fundamental questions must be asked and answered continually: What should be taught, and how should it be taught? The answer to the second question is highly dependent on the answer to the first, but the present answer to the first question is inadequate and inappropriate to today's communication tools. Language…

Folk models have been called unspecified programs that are passed on and learned experientially. Through a narrative reconstruction of a participant observer's fieldnotes on an eighth-grade teacher's professional activity, the researcher sensed two folk models at work: (1) knowledge as corpus, hierarchically organized; and (2) knowledge in…

Changes in the teacher's authority structure as well as changes in the content of student talk during peer response sessions occur over the course of a school year in a first-grade classroom. In the beginning of the year, the teacher, a beginner in the Teachers College Writing Project, dominated the talk during share sessions, while the students'…

In its first year, the Hawaiian Language Immersion Program combined kindergarten and first-grade students in two classes. About half of the students had no speaking knowledge of Hawaiian; the remainder had attended Hawaiian-language preschools and/or spoke Hawaiian at home. Both teachers, fluent speakers of Hawaiian, were new to teaching. The…

In linguistic analysis of the speech act, the data used to support theoretical conclusions are too often comprised of semantically isolated utterances of the ideal speaker-hearer. In reality, one of the most revealing kinds of data is imperfect data, where the functioning language processes are often unmasked. The study of first language…

In order to design a cognitive model of ethnic attitudes, an interdisciplinary project has analyzed strategies used in everyday conversation among majority members about minority groups, e.g., immigrant workers from Turkey and Morocco and people from Surinam. Data were collected through undirected interviews among people in an Amsterdam…

When writing is taught through conferences between a student and teacher, the authority of the teacher profoundly influences what students think and say about writing. Also, as students learn to deal with their teacher's authority, they develop strategies for talking about writing tasks in voices that are authentically their own. An examination of…

Poets' working drafts and their comments on their processes indicate overwhelmingly that they, like experienced writers of other genres, are extensive revisers. The biggest difficulty with the term "revising" is that it designates both the changes made to a text and the mental processes and attitudes that underlie these changes. Even the…

Questioning patterns in dialogue journal interactions of two groups of sixth graders are analyzed. One of the two groups was made up of native English speakers, while the other consisted of beginning learners of English as a second language. The analysis finds a pattern of shared interaction very different from that found in numerous studies of…

Impromptu speech is heard only once, at a rate of perception that depends on the speaker's delivery, and is specifically adapted to the listeners. These features trigger cognitive activities that facilitate translation. Impromptu speech is characterized by a constant interconnection between cognitive competence and language competence and between…

Conference interpreting is an oral impromptu activity. Since texts delivered at conferences range from unprepared oral texts to prepared written texts, there can be clashes between the impromptu features of conference interpreting and features of prepared written texts. Knowledge of the field of discourse and of the predictability of text…