This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 23 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: the rhetoric of various reformers and reform groups; speech disorganization and information retention, credibility, and attitude; the concurring and dissenting…

This paper describes the composition of one particular kind of study guide called a pattern guide that can be used by content area teachers to aid their students in reading and understanding their textbooks. The purpose of the guide is stated as highlighting the reading and thinking skills to be used as well as the most important concepts to be…

The study described here offers a model of target-context relations in language comprehension. It is based on the hypothesis that the same formal mechanisms that produce cohesion in discourse and texts are critically involved in language comprehension. The model posits that: (1) the comprehension of a target turn is primarily dependent on the…

A telephone conversation was transcribed and marked for stress. A portion of the transcription, not marked for stress, was given to native English speakers who were asked to underline the word(s) in each sentence or phrase that should receive the most prominent stress. The overlap of actual stress and the assignments of the participants who were…

After 104 high and low ability ninth grade students read prose passages, they wrote all that they remembered about the passage, exhibiting how text features affected text recall. The materials varied in length, the number of propositions presented, and whether headings were used to organize the passage. Only one of the two sets of directions used…

Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) is a theory that predicts how units of information should be distributed in a sentence and how sentences should be related in a discourse. A binary topic-comment structure is assigned to each FSP sentence. For most English sentences, the topic is associated with the subject or the left-most noun phrase, and…

This paper examines the effect of a teacher's management and turn-allocation acts on student performance during reading group lessons in a first grade classroom. The class was observed and videotaped for a year, and interviews were conducted with both teacher and students. The study focuses specifically on cases where management, turn-allocation,…

A study investigated whether comprehension of a text could be enhanced by careful structuring of the lesson elements surrounding it. One group of ten second grade children received a reading lesson as prescribed in a basal series that directed attention to irrelevant content while failing to highlight consistently important story elements. A…

Because President Lyndon Johnson understood well the publicity value of the American news media, he sought to exploit them. He saw reporters as "torch bearers" for his programs and policies and used the presidential press conference chiefly for promotional purposes. Although he met with reporters often, his press conferences were usually…

A structural analysis according to narrative rules and common content elements was made of stories on an identical theme in three different foreign language texts. The purpose of the analysis was to highlight some of the elements by which an educational institution influences its students through the world view it espouses. The three texts chosen…

The following papers and reports are included: (1) "Prisoners of Code-Centred Privacy: Reflections on Contrastive Analysis and Related Disciplines" by Kari Sajavaara and Jaakko Lehtonen; (2) "The Methodology and Practice of Contrastive Discourse Analysis" by Sajavaara, Lehtonen, and Liisa Korpimies; (3) "Interactional Activities in Discourse…

Research into the influence of a context sentence on the processing of a subsequent sentence in spoken discourse examined two issues: (1) whether context influences the immediate processing and organization of a subsequent clause, and (2) whether listeners make certain types of context-based inferences prior to the end of a sentence. Three…

To examine the effects of the contextual variables of relationship intimacy and time on communication satisfaction, a study was undertaken involving 252 college freshmen. The subjects participated in one of two treatments. In the first, they were randomly paired and participated in social conversation for 15 minutes. Following the conversation,…

Two speeches by Betty Friedan, author of "The Feminine Mystique" and first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), are examined in this paper. The first speech analyzed, "Tokenism and the Pseudo-Radical Cop-Out," was delivered at Cornell University in January, 1969, and the second, a "Call to Women's Strike…

A review of research reveals that, although several reading researchers recognize the significance of grammatical complexity beyond the sentence in reading comprehension, little research exists in this area of grammatical interrelationships among sentences. The first step toward an understanding of grammatical complexity beyond the sentence is for…