This paper inquires analytically about the connotative meaning of the terms poverty and learning as they function in the language of comparative education research. In the analysis of concepts, the analytical techniques used are the techniques of definition, explication, illustration, and substitution. Four conceptions of the term learning and…

This paper studies meaning as a construct of human interaction. Basic to this approach is the concept of the act of communication, which may be realized verbally or non-verbally. In order to integrate non-verbal behaviors into descriptions of discourse and interaction, a series of functional, not anatomic, categories is needed. For the kinesic…

The development of a story grammar represents an attempt to describe the higher order cognitive structures that are used to encode, represent, and retrieve information from stories such as folktales or fables. These structures, defined as a set of rewrite rules, specify the types of information that should occur in stories and the types of logical…

This is an examination of beginning teachers' acquisition of the structures of classroom discourse. Teachers were compared at the beginning and at the end of their first teaching year using a discourse analysis system. Thirty-three hours of audiotapes from 11 teachers were transcribed an coded. Teacher initiations during informing, eliciting, and…

The analysis of story recall, a device used widely in reading research to gauge comprehension, typically involves a process of mapping recall against the original story. The process is based on the assumption that subjects are aiming for verbatim recall. To test the validity of this assumption, an analysis was conducted of 20 narrative retellings,…

Teachers read student papers with both eager and anxious expectancy about discourse they have caused but not written. Whatever the teachers may have said about what they will look for as they read, they still measure each paper against their ideas about appropriate performances in each of the categories of textual analysis. They are not reacting…

To determine the number of distinct words in printed school English, a study analyzed a 7,260 word sample from the "Word Frequency Book" prepared by J. B. Carroll, P. Davies, and B. Richman. Projecting from the sample to the total vocabulary of school English, the best estimate was that it contained about 88,500 distinct words. Furthermore, for…

Ethnographic classroom research shows culturally different children follow non-congruent patterns in arguments with their peers. Protests by two first grade boys from different cultures are examined, and some ways in which their protesting styles differ are indicated. A Black American child pursues final protests using successively more aggravated…

Four position papers are presented that were given during a study-week dealing with questions related to language as communication, the notion of argumentation in second language teaching methodology, and ways of introducing argumentation phenomena into the language class. The papers, representing four different positions, are the following: (1)…

A study was conducted to examine writing skill, particularly maintenance of coherence, in an environment where the information load was heavy and students would be expected to have problems organizing it. The students, all proficient in English, were enrolled in a postsecondary biology class. Two of the six students in the study had high objective…

The following papers and reports on discourse analysis are included here: (1) "Discourse Analysis, What's That?" by Hatch and Long; (2) "Contextual Analysis of English: Applications to TESL" by Celce-Murcia; (3) "Discourse and Second Language Acquisition of Yes/No Questions" by Vander Brook, Schlue, and Campbell; (4)…

Sound-meaning correspondences produced by an infant were studied under conditions of early rampant homonymy (i.e., production by a very young child of a small set of noncontrastive surface forms or phonetic sequences to refer to objects/events that on the basis of adult standards require the production of numerous contrasting surface forms). The…

Noting that viewing reading as a communicative act can heighten educators' awareness of the ways in which one story can be embedded within another, this report presents and discusses several examples of stories within stories. The report discusses the various participants communicating in a story within a story--the real and implied authors and…

Although content related questions may indicate the depth of a readers' understanding of a passage, they do not necessarily help readers develop more general strategies for extracting information from print. A program of strategies to develop comprephension skills should include prereading instruction, activities that increase awareness of written…