An examination of letters left at the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, D.C. between November, 1984 and April, 1986 revealed that the memorial serves as a rhetorical situation that urges its visitors to eloquence. The memorial is an excellent proving ground for situational theory because the interaction of site and perception is vital to…

Three typical television news reports broadcast on the "CBS Evening News with Dan Rather" in early 1987 were analyzed (1) to test the validity of the assumption that news reports of this type are persuasive and therefore can be classified as rhetoric and (2) to gain insights into the message structure of the reports. The three reports…

A study examined the effects of (1) providing students with instruction in a "discourse-structure" reading and writing strategy on college freshmen's recall and comprehension of history textbook passages; and (2) this procedure on the quality of students' expository writing. Subjects, 126 college freshmen, randomly assigned to one of…

Papert (1980) contended that the value of the Logo computer program lies in its ability to allow children to take control of their own learning processes and to acquire skills and concepts independently of a stifling curriculum generated by adults. It is argued here that Papert's ideas are preserved when teachers' modelling of cognitive strategies…

Simplification of text as a pedagogical technique in second language instruction implies: (1) the selection of a restricted set of features from the full range of foreign language resources (linguistic simplification) and/or (2) the rearrangement of content of foreign language messages (content simplification) for purposes of instructional…

Part of a larger research program studying communication in the cockpit, this study investigated the occurrence of mitigation, that is, the use of linguistic forms that convey propositional content without giving offense, and its relationship to aviation accidents. The data were from flight-recorder accident transcripts containing observable…

In addition to presenting the results of analyses of written texts from a linguistic perspective, this book proposes productive methods for discourse analysis and identifies new directions for work on written communication. The studies presented in the book illustrate the importance of text linguistics and discourse analysis for research on…

Ethical issues make writing assignments more than academic exercises, especially when the ethical issues involve the writing itself. Such issues arise in every aim and mode of discourse and in every stage of the writing process, from choosing a topic to editing the final draft. Informative discourse must be factual and comprehensive, and have…

Four different kinds of story were presented to children aged 4,7, and 10 years and to adults. In the stories, the relationship between basic-level referents mentioned in the first part of the story and the related superordinates mentioned in the second part was changed by means of different kinds of articles introducing the superordinates:…

A study investigated the rating scale used in the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) oral interview, focusing on the concept of vocabulary underlying assessment. The study examined the differences in strategies used by fluent native speakers and non-fluent non-native speakers to avoid disruption of communication in real conversation when…

Drawing on Michael Halloran's genre of public proceedings, the Iran-contra hearings can be viewed from a celebratory or epideictic perspective, with several conceptualizations of the genre combined to illuminate the functions of the hearings. The primary function of the hearings, at least from an epideictic viewpoint, was the reassurance of the…

Six question and answer exchanges between a teacher and a student were analyzed to illustrate teachers' intuitive practical knowledge of questioning skills. It is suggested that this knowledge of questioning techniques is systematic and organized and that the teacher draws intuitively from a systematic framework of questioning patterns. A theory…

A collection of three papers written at a workshop on discourse grammar in Philippine languages is presented. The aims of the workshop were to (1) focus on discourse level grammar in the languages studied; (2) identify contrastive discourse types (genre) in the surface grammar; (3) identify the semantic constructions encoded by the different…

Kindergarten-aged children's use of parallel constructions in their peer storytelling, while not common, reflect children's interest in the organizational principle of theme and variation. Semantic and syntactic parallelism represent two of many ways in which some youngsters employ theme and variation in their storytelling. The constructions give…

A study examined the legal treatment of the press in constitutions or other basic legal institutional documents from around the world. Sixty-three constitutions or basic documents from the Western World, the Communist Bloc, the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America were analyzed. Analysis revealed that most constitutions open with…