The titles of papers in this document on impromptu or spontaneous speech are as follows: "Impromptu Speech, Structure, and Process"; "Non-Verbal Aspects of Impromptu Speech"; "Echanges, interventions et actes de langage dans la structure de la conversation" ("Exchanges, Interventions, and Speech Acts in the…

In a written discourse consisting of a string of "psychological paragraphs," there is in each such psychological paraqraph a "head" structure containing the topic which derives from the deep structure of the discourse. That "head" assertion differs from all other assertions in the psychological paragraph in that it carries new information. The…

A study to find patterns of cohesion and rhetorical structure that distinguish good from weak English essay writing is described. The corpus consisted of ten Swedish college essays written as part of the final exam in a first-year English course. Methodological problems encountered included the delimitation of units for the analysis of cohesive…

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…

A study comparing the speech used by English-as-a-second-language teachers (N=4) when instructing beginning- and advanced-level adult classes found that display questions and self-repetitions were used much less often with advanced students, suggesting that students are being prepared, as they advance in classes, for real communicative…

The interactive processes of university engineering lectures are analyzed from five points of view. Although the research is applicable to the study of lecturing in general, it is intended to have specific application to programs for students for whom English is a second language. A discourse analysis is based on models by Sinclair/Coulthard and…

The quality of hospital medical records, which are usually maintained by transcribing from doctors' dictation, was found to suffer because of foreign medical graduates' phonological problems and lack of familiarity with good dictation procedure. As a step in correcting this situation, eight taped discharge summaries were subjected to an analysis…

Sentences are understood by outlining associative relations between the concepts representing the meanings of the words. When the words are received the activation spreads from their conceptual counterparts to the other concepts in memory, so that some implicit thoughts are often added to the mental representation of a sentence. As sentences are…

The examination for the C.A.P.E.S. (Certificat d'Aptitude Professionnelle a l'Enseignement Secondaire) includes a ten-minute "precise and concise" oral talk on a short story. The presentation is to be prepared in a short time and delivered in a polished manner. Because of the high failure rate, an experimental course is being designed at the…