This article compares ordinary conversational topics and targeted second language (L2) forms for their effectiveness in building and maintaining classroom discourse cohesion. In this study, 16 learners participated in 2 lessons, 1 with teacher turns determined by a grammatical object of instruction, and the other with turns determined by…

To explore the concept of lexical collocation, or relationships between words, a study was conducted based on three assumptions: (1) that a text structure for a unit of discourse was analogous to that existing at the level of the sentence, (2) that such a text form could be discovered if a large enough sample of generically similar texts was…

Sentence-by-sentence analysis of factual or propositional cohesion in the first 29 lines of a Swedish children's story finds several sources of coherence that contribute to its cohesion. First, the text receives much coherence from its description of a single event, a situation where happenings are normal and expected. Second, a rather primitive…

Based on the theory that a story's coherence depends directly on the causal cohesiveness of the story's individual events, this paper describes (1) a process by which readers use causal reasoning to connect events, (2) what memory representations result from this reasoning, and (3) the implications of test data on causal reasoning. Following a…

Children's early writing is analyzed in this paper according to different perspectives such as function, grapho-phonemics, syntax, and semantics. Emphasis is given to the semantic perspective of decoding the text and to the study of coherence in text as it is viewed by the reader. Proposition analysis is used to map the coherence of samples of…

This paper examines what devices a speaker of English uses to produce continuous language, and how such devices are used in English. (CLK)

Questions the assumption that literal, figurative, and anomalous sentences should be regarded as qualitatively different kinds of speech rather than as portions of a continuum of language use. (RL)

Describes a study contrasting hierarchical and causal approaches to story understanding indicating that when the number of causal connections increases, the likelihood of summarization for both goal and other statements increases. Suggests that the importance accorded to a statement in a story structure is the result of causal reasoning during…

Criticizes traditional methods of defining the syntactical complexity of utterances and proposes distinguishing the various types of subordination in the sentence as well as elements of continuity and discontinuity in discourse structure, with particular reference to child language. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/AM)

Children listened to stories which contained anomalies produced by violating semantic restrictions or based on conflicting propositions at two points in a story. The capacity to detect violations of sentences developed more rapidly than detection of violation of discourse. Children's developing capacity to integrate and store story structure is…

This study examined the discourse-processing operations of children identified as good and poor readers. It entailed comparing subjects' memory of text to the content and structure of the text itself. Findings indicated differences in both the quality and quantity of student recall. (MKM)

Provides several research questions regarding discourse theory, which can be answered by classroom teachers of writing using their students' writing. (DD)

Examines the theoretical category in discourse analysis called "inferrable information" and challenges the implicit assumptions that lead Prince (1981) to distinguish between inferrable and invoked information. Four marked syntactic constructions in Farsi and English are examined that have previously been shown to be relevant to…

This study analyzed dialogs between 10 mothers and their children, ages 12-14, who were normally hearing or orally communicating deaf. Adolescents who were deaf displayed similar turn-taking skills to the normally hearing adolescents. Mothers of deaf adolescents did not dominate the conversation. (Author/SW)