The language of 29 Canadian children was sampled during the first two years of schooling in free conversations and in more formal school-like tasks as part of a three-year longitudinal study of the properties of oral language and their relation to other measures of cognitive, linguistic, and reading performance. The language samples were subjected…

Experimental and supplementary observational studies of how children help one another learn are reported. In the experiment, developmental patterns in children's discourse in two common peer-learning situations were investigated. Sixty-four pairs of children, drawn equally from kindergarten and second grade, participated in the study. Dyads,…

Two major strategies for linguistically encoding an idea or proposition are suggested. The first strategy involves encoding an idea in the space of a single utterance, while the second strategy conveys the proposition through a sequence of two or more utterances. The tendency has been to focus on discourse as a composite of sentences (the first…

The source of syntactic ambiguity and facts concerning the resolution of such ambiguity are discussed in this paper. The attitude of qenerative linguists towards ambiguity is examined, and a working distinction is drawn between vaqueness and ambiguity. The consequences of this distinction are then examined for syntactic ambiguity and an ordering…

Videotaped recordings of supervisor-teacher micro-teaching playback sessions were used to identify evaluative discourse. Fifteen student teachers discussed a 10-30 minute lesson they had just taught to college freshmen, with graduate student supervisors. Supervisors and student teachers evaluated lesson topics such as teacher questions, content,…

The intent of this study was to determine the extent to which preschool children's speech to self, their private speech, was differentiated from their social speech. Ten randomly chosen preschool children, six boys and four girls with a median age of 56 months, were observed in conditions supportive of oral communication (free play), and in…

A study was conducted of the Baie Sainte-Marie Acadian dialect, a particular form of the French language derived from the French spoken in France during the 16th and 17th centuries. The purpose of this study was to analyze and explain a certain number of morphosyntactic deviations from standard French, from both a synchronic and a diachronic…

This paper describes an ongoing literacy research project involving writing samples and observations of workers in a state social service agency, a large labor union, and several scientific laboratories. Procedures discussed are: (1) selecting participants who were willing to give 16 hours of interview time over the course of a year; (2) selecting…

The teaching of discourse features which affect the relations among sentences in a paragraph has often been delayed until students are considered advanced. Yet, because control of such features is considered essential to gaining control of language segments, instruction in these features should be given from the beginning. One category of…

The approximately 500 entries in this third edition of an annotated bibliography were drawn from the professional literature relating to linguistics, psycholinguistics, and reading. Entries are arranged ln the following categories: (1) beginning reading; (2) comprehension, semantics, and meaning; (3) curriculum; (4) language differences such as…

This report compares a typical newspaper account of an event with other possible ways of narrating the event. It argues that journlists' beliefs about the appropriate format, style, and content for a news story work in concert to obscure the structure of the story and the relations among subparts, and thus serve to thwart their presumed goal in…

THIS PAPER DISCUSSES THE THEORY THAT CONTENT ANALYSIS OF MESSAGES IS A CONTRAL TOPIC IN ALL SCIENCES DEALING WITH MAN. CONTENT ANALYSIS IS THE DETERMINATION OF CHARACTERISTICS OF A SOURCE FROM THE NATURAL LANGUAGE UTTERANCES IT EMITS. ASSIGNING PROPERTIES TO WORDS AND THEN COUNTING THE APPEARANCES OF THE PROPERTIES IS INSUFFICIENT--THE CONTENT OF…

Any theory of stylistics sets itself the task of accounting for choices made by a speaker/writer among theoretically available and more-or-less equivalent linguistic structures. This task is a stumbling-block in the way of most attempts to construct a theory of style because there is no consistent method of defining 'available structures' and…

This document provides case studies of innovative Composition I programs at six community colleges throughout the country. Information on the various programs was obtained by means of field research at the colleges. Chapter One describes a grammar-oriented approach at Houston Community College and analyzes the reasons and techniques of teaching…

This study explored varying uses of the concept "involvement" in ordinary speech, examined the concept as found in the literature on adult education program planning, and analyzed its use and validity in empirical behavioral science research. It was expected that the concept would be further clarified, thus increasing the likelihood of forming…