A principal cause of the seeming "foreignness" in the compositions of English as a second language (ESL) university students is discussed, and an approach to correcting the problem is suggested. It is asserted that the English language compositions of ESL students reflect native language rhetorical norms which are culturally based. Discourse bloc…

The two current approaches to teaching academic discourse are conventional and collaborative; in practice, they overlap because both are based on a "conversational model" of learning to write in college. Taxonomists and collaborationists disagree on the relative emphasis that should be placed on the various pedagogical methods:…

Linguistic models, especially the derivational theory of complexity, partially explain human comprehension of isolated sentences but not connected discourse. Two versions of a message, one entirely active sentences, the other entirely passive were written to compare transformational complexity. Subjects heard the messages at normal (150 wpm) rates…

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether the connective structure of a passage might protect interrelated information from interference by irrevelant information in sentence recognition. Subjects of both experiments were college students enrolled in introductory psychology classes. In each, a rating task for unconnected phrases was…

Teachers are often baffled by the inability of a number of basic writing students to use the proper connective to show relationship between sentences or phrases for coherence. Most frustrating is the teacher's inadequacy in giving definitions or explanations beyond the student's textbook descriptions of the connectives. However, a cursory…

Helping students understand coherence in terms of the lexical ties and semantic relations possible between clauses and sentences formalizes an area of writing instruction that has been somewhat vague before and makes the process of creating a coherent paragraph less mysterious. Many students do not have the intuitive knowledge base for absorbing…

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…

Native speakers, when listening to lectures, sift through the information to choose what to listen to, make hypotheses about future discourse, synthesize preceding discourse, and add their own background knowledge. Nonnative speakers, in their native languages, follow the same procedures. When dealing with a foreign language, however, they are not…

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.…

"Muddiness" in student writing can be eliminated, and students can learn to write with clarity, through the employment of a 1-3-3-3-1 pattern: one opening sentence, three paragraphs of three sentences each, and one closing sentence. To this basic pattern, the concept of key words may be added to help students develop a focus for each piece of…

It was hypothesized that writers of sentence pairs with clear relationships would have better recall of second sentences than would writers of sentence pairs with unclear relationships. Clear connections between sentences in sentence pairs were defined as those sentences in which the language of the first sentence was explicitly picked up in the…

In an analysis of a processing activities model of memory applied to connected discourse, 206 college students assigned to eight conditions in two studies evidenced significantly greater recall when provided with semantic level tasks than either surface feature analysis or reading control (intentional and incidental) conditions. Additionally,…

This conference presentation is offered as a prolegomenon, or introduction, to a paper and research project. The issues of whether prolegomena are modernist explanatory devices and whether postmodern prolegomena are possible are discussed. The paper proposes a research inquiry into "postmodern teaching" initiated through the metaphor of…

To test three specific hypotheses about recall as a function of four categories of logical relations, a study was done to determine whether logical relations systems of prose analysis can be used to predict recall. Two descriptive passages of naturally occurring expository prose were used. Each text was parsed into 45 statements, consisting of…

The problems encountered by English as second language (ESL) students in selecting verb tenses for their written discourse were investigated. Tape recorded interviews with four freshman composition students who had been referred for intensive work on verb errors were analyzed for students' explanations of their errors and the contexts in which…