Students in grades 4, 5, or 6 can learn to write more concretely, accurately, and deliberately by employing three strategies: (1) elimination of those words or phrases that garble meaning or repeat unnecessarily; (2) substitution of more specific, concrete, and generally more appropriate expressions for ones that are vague and unimaginative; and…

This study compares the degree of cohesion and coherence in the essays written by thirty Filipino college freshmen and analyzes how the social construction of meaning was made evident in their writing. Results showed that low, mid and highly rated essays were comparable in grammatical cohesive device use. Lexical repetition and use of synonyms…

A rating instrument for describing nine structural characteristics of written compositions is presented and explained. (JH)

Reports on a study of 60 undergraduates which investigated correlations between style variations (inversion, ornamentation, condensation, poor distribution, and deliberate misleadingness) and such psychological factors as reading ease, mental organization, and recall. (DD)

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 aim of this study was to gain insight into the extent to which health education text writers apply writing principles derived from cognitive psychological theory. Seventeen professional text writers of health education materials participated in a qualitative study, consisting of a rewriting task combined with a think-aloud procedure and a…

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…

Advocates a method of teaching writing which leads students to discover the rules of written English so that they can then transform a string of grammatical sentences into a coherent discourse. Sample lessons included. Paper presented at the TESOL Convention, March 1969. (FWB)

Faulting the audiolingual method for concentrating primarily on manipulative skills in language learning, the author stresses that the development of true communicative competence involves the learner's conscious awareness of grammar rules and language context. (FWB)

This investigation provides descriptive information about the developmental characteristics of syntactic and morphological structures found in the written Spanish language of native Spanish-speaking students in fourth to ninth grades. A sample population composed of 34 male and 56 female Spanish-speaking students was randomly selected from two…

The focus of this study will be on the intersection of the following domains: Second Language Acquisition research on cohesion and coherence, discourse acquisition of young children, the effect of text form-focused instruction on student non-fiction writing and the impact of schema theory on student decision-making during the writing process.

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…

The purpose of this study is to ascertain whether the type of instruction (English as vehicular language and English as a subject) is related to the use of reiteration ties. In the first place, we identified, classified, and counted the number and kind of reiteration ties used by two groups of EFL learners. Secondly, we examined whether…

The Halliday and Hasan (1976) method of categorizing semantic units was used to analyze the cohesive strategies used by secondary students learning English as a second language. The method involves classifying and charting the network of semantic relationships, the types of cohesive devices, and the number of breaks in the flow of a text or…

The teacher of English prose is responsible for teaching students three skills: the ability to react with appropriate sensibility to prose literature, the ability to understand written prose, and the ability to write prose that can be understood. A study of the precision and demands of the best modern novelists (Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, Faulkner,…