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)

Examines structural ties that children use to join their sentences into a coherent paragraph or composition. (HTH)

Provides a brief review of sentence combining development and research, and suggests some future directions for the technique. (RL)

Investigated the source of agrammatic aphasic patients' difficulty comprehending semantically reversible sentences. Found approximately equal distributions of three distinct patterns. Results conflict with explanations of comprehension failure which state that a single pattern of performance on sentence structures characterizes comprehension of…

Explores findings from research on the psychology of reading that may confirm and enlarge upon both the importance of planning and the perceptions of plans in writing and reading. (RL)

Describes three semantic theories for teaching the writing process (case grammars, the "given-new" contract, and cohesion), with their implications for helping students communicate more effectively with their audiences. (RL)

Grammatical theories that rely exclusively on the categorical nature of constituents to determine their syntactic behavior encounter problems when dealing with cleft construction. The ungrammaticality of such constructions is indeed syntactic in nature and can be shown to derive from a general principle of universal grammar (UG), restricting the…

Concerned with improving student comprehension of text, this book focuses particularly on teaching students how sentences tie together. Articles in the three sections are grouped as follows: Part 1, What Is Cohesion Comprehension? contains "Cohesion, Coherence, and Comprehension" (Alden J. Moe and Judith W. Irwin); "Identifying…

Sentence combining (SC) has proved to be valuable in increasing the syntactic maturity of students. However, teachers have felt uncomfortable with the arhetorical nature of SC. Little research has been done on the relation of cognitive processes and SC. SC might be more useful if account is taken of the fact that syntax is an abode for cognitive…

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…

One factor that contributes to the difficulty that a reader may encounter when reading a text is the syntactic complexity of the constructions used in the text. Examples of altered text constructions include the transformations of subjects of subordinate clauses, making them either the subjects or the objects of main clauses. When the conditions…

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.…

The function of word order is examined in light of interference in the learning of English discourse by Chinese speakers and vice versa. Emphasis on different devices in coding discourse functions is shown to be reflected in interference between the two languages. (13 references) (LB)

Inversion constructions (declarative sentence constructions in which the subject follows part or all of its verb phrase) are distributed over the whole range of spoken and written language, not along the spoken-written dimension but along a colloquial-literary dimension. Some of these inversions are colloquial or literary for functional reasons,…

A review of the literature reveals that three writing skills have been of particular interest to writing researchers recently. First, work on planning the rhetorical strategy recognizes three components of the planning process: prewriting, pausing, and reviewing what has been written. Second, research on audience analysis indicates that maturity…