This paper discusses the parameters of discourse topic management in terms of a multidimensional model of topic coherence; interaction between these parameters and linguistic and cognitive knowledge; effects of discourse, linguistic, and cognitive level difficulties on topic parameters; a method of assessment across all parameters and knowledge…

This paper reviews literature on peer relationships of children with specific language impairment and provides a clinical case to illustrate the social-interactional difficulties encountered. The paper analyzes the quantity and quality of peer interactions, child's knowledge of interactive access behaviors, disputes, responsiveness, assertiveness,…

Although most models of connected discourse are strikingly similar in the types of relationships they describe, they are strikingly different in two areas: the unit of analysis and the dimensions on which cohesion versus coherence are described. Common systems for analyzing written text use the sentence, T-unit, clause, or proposition as the unit…

Points out that if relationships between sentences are made implicit (for the sake of simplicity or readability), comprehension may suffer and explains three teaching strategies for improving students' comprehension of implicit connectives. (RL)

Ways in which the study of discourse analysis can aid the teacher of basic writing in helping their students to express themselves fluently are explored in this paper. It is noted that remedial writers need to learn to relate abstract ideas to concrete examples and that they seem unable to supply the connections between ideas, especially those of…

This report describes the work of the text analysis groups of the Center for the Study of Reading, whose goals are to investigate the problem of reading comprehension from the standpoint of comparing properties of texts to the difficulty or ease of reading and to construct appropriate theories to account for text properties. The text analysis…

Coherence and cohesion are fundamental considerations of the composing process that help to define the global and local components of texuality. Global text coherence centers on those aspects of the familiar rhetorical situation. Coherence operates at the paragraph and essay levels, answering questions about focus, tone, mode, topic, and thesis.…

Impromptu speech can be defined in different ways: in terms of situational context, linguistic characteristics, and real-time processing. These approaches are not contradictory. There are certain situations that call for rapid processing of spoken discourse, and the needs of that processing are reflected in the structure of the text. The degree of…

Arguing that discourse coherence can provide a window on the writing processes that produce it, this paper describes developmental differences observed in children's writing and proposes a procedural model to account for those differences. The first section of the paper points out that a developmental model of the writing process should specify…

This paper reports on a project involving student recall of the dialogue in a movie and retention of the "anchor," which in this case refers to a videotape recording of "To Kill a Mockingbird." The project looked at how students retained knowledge over a few days and what kind of activities resulted from expertise with an…

Although spoken language was the subject of attention among Soviet linguists for a short period in the 1920s, it has not attracted much attention since then. The main concern of Soviet linguists has been the forms of written language. Only at the end of the 1960s did linguists begin to record spontaneous speech on tape and study its forms. The…

Two theoretical orientations-schema theory and cultural norms for the use of language unify this multidisciplinary collection of papers examining discourse. Chapters by Adams and Collins; Warren; Nicholas and Trabasso; Stein and Glenn; and Freedle and Hale highlight the application of schema theory to the study of story recall, reading, and the…