This article reflects one session of a course in thinking and communicating for Pace University (New York) faculty. The purpose of the course was to heighten awareness that language can seriously misrepresent events which it describes, thus affecting students' ability to perceive, evaluate, and make day-to-day decisions. Beginning with a concrete…

To gain a sense of good rhetorical structure, what students of writing in English as a second language need to do is not to practice writing paragraphs and essays conforming to particular patterns, but rather to recognize and understand the resources available for indicating relationships between the propositions that make up their own, unique…

Statistical analyses of the incidence of "what"-questions requiring variably complex responses are presented. The responses were asked of a bilingual child by different sets of caretakers in English and German over a one-year period starting at age 16 months. Results show that the caretakers' questions are geared first toward the child's…

This study investigates whether other relationships in sentence structure besides the "brother-in-law" relation sanction surrogate agreement in Zinacanteco Tzotzil (Mayan). Surrogate agreement refers to cases in which an element that lies outside the class of regular agreement controllers in a language (the surrogate) controls…

The innovative use of a visual cueing device, or rods, in a second language class to represent the parts of speech and the grammatical structure of a sentence is explained and illustrated. The advantages found in it are that individual structures are not learned as isolated elements but rather as parts of a larger system, and that there is more…

A crucial concept in Francis Christensen's principles of writing involves the "addition," which may be construed as any grammatical unit that is not a main clause. Obviously the effect of rhetorical writing derives mainly from the number of additions as well as from their placement and function within the single sentence. By means of…

A study of the process of listeners' and readers' generation and verification of expectations about spoken and written discourse presented to them examined the possible interactions between surface form and cognitive constraints, to establish baseline measures of the effectiveness of different sentence structures in constraining the production of…

An experiment was carried out to determine how the memory search of a two-clause complex sentence in immediate memory is carried out. An item-recognition task was performed with 32 native English-speaking, right-handed adults who listened to eight two-clause complex sentences presented to the left ear, each immediately followed by a probe word…

Research has established that classroom verbal interaction typically involves turn taking cycles described as "teacher solicits,""pupil responds," and "teacher reacts." A study examined the question/answer cycles occurring within 36 videotaped language arts lessons conducted by six elementary school teachers and made inferences regarding what…

Readers are "dumb" because they are not privy to the mind and intentions of the writer; and the failure of the unsuccessful writer is a failure to forecast what it is going to be like to be a dumb reader of the document. Sample sentences from students' writing illustrate the following types of writing problems, which force the reader to examine…

Readability estimates are usually based on measures of word difficulty and measures of sentence difficulty. Word difficulty is measured in two ways: by the structural size and complexity of words or by reference to phonomena of language use, such as word-list frequency or the regularity of spelling patterns. Sentence difficulty is measured only in…

A review of the literature reveals that increased syntactic maturity is developmental growth properly associated with elementary and junior high school students and that measuring this maturity will not prove that an individual writer is skilled or unskilled. Improved style, unlike increased syntactic maturity, is not quantifiable growth, though…

The effect of the interaction between imagery level and number of semantic propositions on junior high readers at three ability levels was studied, using an instrument that compared two levels of imagery at each of five levels of semantic propositions. Syntax, word frequency, and number of arguments were held constant. The results indicated that…

The aim of this paper is to account for some semantic properties of Romanian interrogatives "ce" and "cine" by establishing some definite correlations between various contextual restrictions governing the use of these interrogative particles and the "meaning" which might be assigned to each of these particles in any…

This study investigated the effect of embedded parts (intervening words between the main subject and verb of a sentence) on young readers' abilities to comprehend when the embedded parts do not present a significant change in sentence structure. Two schools in Bemidji, Minnesota, were selected for the study: school one is located in a low…