One of the most consistent findings of research on discourse is that important text information is better learned than less important information because readers devote more attention to the important information. There is now very good reason to believe that questions cause readers to attend selectively to question-relevant information and that a…

A study was conducted to define the linguistic and discourse parameters of text difficulty from the point of view of both the reader and the text in order to redefine readability and to provide an operational way of explaining processing difficulties of the near-mature reader. Subjects were 14-year-old students in the United States and the United…

Conventional wisdom holds that the right-wing John Birch Society disintegrated during the late 1960s. An examination of the society's periodical readership indicates that it has, instead, expanded. Moreover, this expansion occurred during a period of ideological dissonance for the organization, a fact that undermines confidence in the explanation…

Adults' and children's descriptions of rooms were compared in terms of the cognitive and communicative aspects of segmentation and linearization. Children's increasing ability to gain structural discourse transparency by using specific linguistic devices was examined. A total of 50 Dutch-speaking children of ages 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 described a…

This document contains six papers from a symposium on counseling process research which offer the application of multiple research perspectives and analysis of a common data set. Analyses of two interviews from a single counseling case include lag analysis of relational control, the investigation of topic control, discourse analysis of the…

This paper focuses on political change in Venezuela from a critical discourse analysis perspective that emphasizes the roles of the participants in the interaction to show how, with their actions, they are affected and affect others. An interactional approach based on Firth's categories of context (Firth, 1951) and conversational analysis is used…

The belief that science attempts to objectively depict reality is based on a positivist philosophy which is currently considered a discredited theory. This essay advances the argument that science can be considered a rhetorical enterprise; that is, that scientists attempt to influence one another's beliefs concerning the acceptability of theories…

This paper discusses the type of marking rule normally used in the production and interpretation of message forms for which semantic marking is possible. The structure and use of such rules is illustrated through a recent study of the semantics of personal address among the Balangingi' Samal, a Muslim group of the southern Philippines. The rule…

Children's use of proforms in spoken descriptions of real situations was studied and compared with that of adults to explore possible developmental progressions in the use of indexical reference. A discourse distinction between situational and textual reference was applied to data from 6-year-old and 10-year-old children and from adults. Subjects…

Competing views of written texts, of the process of writing, and of the purposes of the scholarly investigation of written discourse appear inherently at odds. Today composition theory is often demeaned as being only pedagogical while literary study is granted the status of a self-fulfilling academic pursuit. What is needed is a model or matrix…

A synthesis of three different writing theories into one model for the writing process is given in this report and evidence is provided for various parts of the model from studies using different methods of investigation. The model developed contains three phases: (1) processing or whiting as discovery, including propositionalizing, subchunking,…

Four normal 3 1/2-year-old preschool girls who varied in degree of talkativeness were observed in a semi-naturalistic setting in order to determine the existence and nature of linguistic differences in their interactions with adults. Adult conversational partners who participated in the study were 28 college-educated females who spoke American…

The interaction of two elementary-age American children with their bilingual mother and French-speaking peers was monitored to determine learning strategies in a natural French immersion situation. Seven strategies were discovered, each of which provided the necessary ingredients of processible input, practice, and feedback to the language…

The schema theory of reading comprehension holds that an active interplay exists between the reader's cognitive structures (schemata) relevant to a text and the text itself. A study examined whether children varying in reading comprehension ability showed differences in the deployment of cognitive structures--specifically, whether good and poor…