This study investigates topic units and suggests some practical applications to the teaching of composition to native speakers and second language learners. A topic unit is a structural unit beyond the sentence. It is composed of clauses and consists of two parts -- a head proposition and a set of comments. The head proposition consists of the…

Based on the theory that a story's coherence depends directly on the causal cohesiveness of the story's individual events, this paper describes (1) a process by which readers use causal reasoning to connect events, (2) what memory representations result from this reasoning, and (3) the implications of test data on causal reasoning. Following a…

The complexity of writing as a skill domain and the lack of consensus about its components have engendered much controversy about the type, length, or number of tasks that should be administered in a given test form and even about whether some aspects of composition require direct assessment through writing samples. Acknowledging this, a study was…

Traditional surveys of children's literature have examined features such as text structure and topic, but have failed to take into account rhetorical elements such as author/reader distance, commentary, point of view, and inside view (insight into characters' minds). Similarly, they have glossed over aspects of character to character interaction,…

This book discusses the relationship between gender and language use in a framework of social interaction. In so doing, it reports on research concerned with sexism in language, the use of language by women and men, and the evaluations of language use by women and men. Language is considered within four theoretical frameworks in which assumptions…

Developing an aesthetic theory of advertising, this paper offers the premise that advertising is a ritual, that it provides cultural roles, and that it reinforces people's perceptions of their common experiences. The paper discusses advertising and advertising art as a process that both draws from and is sustained by general culture while serving…

Two points--that arrangement is as important as invention in the study of rhetoric and that coherence, vital to arrangement, can be more fully understood through discourse analysis--are argued in this paper. Following a brief review of the literature that stresses the importance of arrangement and the contributions of linguistic research to…

To understand a text, a reader must engage in three important cognitive activities--recognition, comprehension, and memory. Based on this premise, two experiments were conducted with children to assess individual and developmental differences in speed of word recognition and how these differences related to performance on a variety of memory…

The assumption that "ideal" text grammars are valid descriptions of the schemata used by children to organize their recall of text was challenged in a study involving 150 elementary school children. The children, all with above-average reading ability, were classified as having one of three types of schemata: theme-initial (identifying…

Students learn, understand, and retain knowledge best when they discover it themselves. In the area of semantics, the study of how meaning is conveyed through language, explicit knowledge may appear to be obvious once it becomes conscious, but unless people are explicitly aware of their implicit knowledge and assumptions, they may be at their…

This annotated bibliography of sociolinguistics is divided into the following sections: speech events, ethnography of speaking and anthropological approaches to analysis of conversation; discourse analysis (including analysis of conversation and narrative), ethnomethodology and nonverbal communication; sociolinguistics; pragmatics (including…

The research studies reviewed in this report show that bicultural readers comprehend and remember materials that deal with their own culture better than materials that deal with an unfamiliar culture. Studies indicating that culturally specific story structures affect reading comprehension are also described. A number of reasons given for not…

Some of the aspects of the author/reader relationship that make communication possible are discussed in this paper. The paper begins by describing the most important components of that relationship. Next, through an analysis of two readings of one of Aesop's fables, it illustrates the way the author and the reader must depend on these components.…

A group of 50 third garde, 51 sixth grade, and 52 eleventh grade students participated in a study to examine the extent to which good readers at three grade levels expected structures in stories, the nature of their expectations, and developmental similarities and differences in their structural expectations. Materials for the study were prepared…

A total of 411 elementary school children seven to twelve years old read short prose passages and selected the most appropriate continuation sentence from four alternatives. The completion sentences were constructed so that the correct (target) response involved either an explicit (simile) or an implicit (metaphor) metaphorical comparison. It was…