The verbal discourse of Yakima children was examined. Conversations with nine Yakima and nine non-Indian children, ranging in age from 3 years 10 months to 5 years 11 months, were tape recorded. Four of the non-Indian children lived on the Yakima Reservation and attended the same preschool program as the Yakima children; the other five lived in…

Examines the relationship between writing and learning in a college-level writing-across-the-curriculum class in philosophy. Results provide a basis for speculation about the conception of the writing/learning relationship and about the viability of further hermeneutical study of student writing. (SRT)

Examines telephone discourse of twenty children between two and five years of age for answerer rules, turn-taking, constructional units, conversational acts, closing sequence, and ability to take messages. Shows developmental differences, although mastery of discourse skills appeared only in response categories, and primarily at four and five…

Considers the culturally patterned set of analogic renamings found in Huli baby talk, nursery rhymes, and children's verbal games. An analysis of socialization activities shows a marked concern with body motifs and appellations and inter-adult behavior involving talk about the body, and showing that such language sensitizes children to cultural…

Some aspects of second language referential communication are analyzed in an experimental setting. The experimental task required subjects, who were visually separated but allowed to converse freely, to reach agreement on the ordering of a set of abstract shapes over a number of trials. (Author/LMO)

Teaching organizational strategies to language-disordered children can improve comprehension and formulation of written language. The semantic organizer approach involves activating and organizing prior knowledge, understanding text structure, and developing organizational strategies with both a verbal component and a graphic-structure component.…

Investigation of use of stative, process, punctual, and non-punctual verbs by a child acquiring Japanese as a first language found that sampled present progressive verb forms occurred with process verbs while these forms were never used with stative verbs. Most omissions of present progressive forms occurred with the early use of "mixed"…

Suggests a more specific-purpose instructional model for English as a second language that is based on a quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis of videotapes of native and non-native speaking teaching assistants. (Author/CB)

Reports results of the impact of various language structures, such as transactive and nontransactive clauses, on readers' understanding of events depicted in newspapers. (PD)

Analyzes the characteristics of exolingual communication, illustrated by case studies of dialogues between French and Latin American Spanish speakers. Hypotheses about exolingual communication are presented, specifically on the "guidance" offered by native speakers and the role of metalinguistic activities. (Author/CB).

Sixth- and seventh-grade teachers were trained to maintain an average teacher wait time of three to five seconds during mathematics and language arts lessons. Longer waits were associated with higher achievement, improved teacher and student discourse, and greater time spent in cognitive processing. (GDC)

Introduces the concept of powerful/powerless talk for instructors interested in incorporating this construct in their classrooms. Provides a brief summary of powerful/powerless talk literature. Offers guidelines for introducing these research findings into the curriculum. (AEW)

Examines the consequences of powerful and powerless speech styles in a hypothetical job interview by investigating the effects of seven linguistic features. Found, for example, that hesitations and tags were judged relatively powerless, ineffective, and unlikely to fulfill the communicator's intentions while polite linguistic forms and…

Used a lexical statistics program to analyze conflict and nonconflict discussions of two different groups of college students. Found preliminary evidence for a pattern of greater redundancy and less vocabulary diversity for the discussion groups in conflict. (PD)

This paper investigated if prior context was used by readers to resolve temporarily ambiguous prepositional phrases. The paper addresses two issues, referring to two competing approaches to sentence processing and testing the predictability of each approach in two online reading experiments. The issues focus on the Human Sentence Processing…