This report details an exploratory study that employs qualitative methods to characterize the academic language used by teachers and students in 4th and 5th grade mainstream science classrooms. Teacher oral language, and to some degree student talk, was observed during content instruction. This type of data allows for a broad descriptive…

Previous research on small-group collaboration identifies several behaviors that significantly predict student learning. These reports focus on student behavior to understand why, for example, large numbers of students are unsuccessful in obtaining explanations or applying help received, leaving unexplored the role that teachers play in …

Revised version of a paper presented at the Seminar on English Teaching in Iran, Tehran, April 1971. (DD)

Special issue devoted to language and history. (VM)

Discusses story grammar and story schema. Demonstrates how two schema-based strategies--semantic webbing and the Directed Reading-Thinking Activity--can aid in improving comprehension. (FL)

Presents a formula for essay writing that forces the student to adopt a point of view from which to analyze and evaluate an author's argument. The format also addresses the problem of organization and mechanics. (HTH)

Suggests that research on the structure of narrative promises to yield practical benefits for the literature curriculum. (JL)

Examined the conversational structure of questions and answers in a performance appraisal interview between a manager and an employee. Results demonstrated that both the manager and employee used question-and-answer pairs to demonstrate their understanding of the expectancy to ask and answer questions and to provide sequential implicativeness and…

Contends that the events at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant mark the failure of technical reasoning and communication practices to master the problems of our age. (PD)

Offers rules and comments for using discourse analysis to teach student writers how to convert incoherent compositions into coherent, cohesive prose. (RL)

College students wrote summaries of short passages to assess their ability to identify important information. Naive summaries judged as "better" contained more major semantic roles, such as agent, than did summaries judged "not as good". Students wrote better summaries when instructed to use major semantic roles within the passage. (Author/RD)

Proposes that dialogue provides children with opportunities to participate with adults in creating linguistic relationships of which they would be incapable alone. Reports the findings of a study of dialogues between mothers and their young children. (FL)