Practitioners working closely with second language (L2) writers in the US recognize at least two types of L2 students: international (IL2) and Generation 1.5 (G1.5) students. Some argue that specific differences in each group's writing performance are evident (cf. Harklau, 2003; Reid, 2006); however, investigations into observable and measurable…

This article reports research from a qualitative case study of three preservice English teachers who participated in the Web Pen Pals project, a university--secondary telecollaborative partnership which paired preservice English teachers enrolled in the author's young adult literature course with local middle school students in online chat rooms…

Samples of formal business reports and business memos were obtained from MBA students in multiple disciplines. The samples were analyzed in terms of their relative cohesion, concreteness of wording, causal relationships, intentional referencing, and readability. A classification function based on these measures was then used to identify entering…

Purpose: This final article covering the topic of the interplay between decoding, comprehension, and content versus structure knowledge describes a set of language initiatives that are focused toward content area learning. Inspired by the work of their colleagues from diverse fields and their own work, the authors offer suggestions to clinicians…

The category of coherence in rating scales has often been criticized for being vague. Typical descriptors might describe students' writing as having 'a clear progression of ideas' or "lacking logical sequencing." These descriptors inevitably require subjective interpretation on the side of the raters. A number of researchers (Connor & Farmer,…

What should college English be? This author contends that college English should be the intersection of the various areas of discourse that shape thought and produce knowledge. It should be the study of the mixing and remixing of connections: those connections that move from popular culture to the university, from geography to politics, from…

The definition of literacy has become narrow, bounded, and associated predominantly with measurement of cognitive skills used to decode words. In this article, the author explores the absence in the literacy instruction of a clear, deliberate, and intentional focus upon "connectedness" between the reader and the text. The author maintains that…

This study examined the representation of knowledge in text writing in 20 ten-year-old children and 20 adults in the Netherlands. The research analyzed the use of clause linking devices to compose larger text units. Special attention was given to the use of causal relational markers and the extent to which causal relations within the texts matched…

There is considerable evidence from psycholinguistics that first language listeners handle function words differently from content words. This makes intuitive sense because content words require the listener to access a lexical meaning representation whereas function words do not. A separate channel of processing for functors would enable them to…

Based on the concept of "connector" introduced by R. Jakobson, the article shows how the concept questions the distinction between "langue" and "parole." (Text is in French.) (AM)

Study of a group of logical connectors in English demonstrates how the meanings of those connectors signal the grounding of the clauses they introduce in absolute terms, unlike other linguistic means of grounding performed by tense, aspect, mood, voice, or verbal categories. (14 references) (Author/CB)

Tests D. Schiffrin's hypothesis that the choice between "CAUSE so RESULT" sequences and "RESULT because CAUSE" sequences is determined by topic continuity against British conversational data from the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English. Produces results similar to Schiffrin's. Concludes that these studies reveal a cohesive…

This study examined Korean English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' ability to establish textual cohesion in English through appropriate selection of reference forms and reference management strategies in their written narrative discourse. It employed both quantitative and qualitative analysis to explore how the language-specific reference…

Inspired by Bakhtin's and Vygotsky's theories of learning, this project explores how "allowing not-knowing" is enacted within collaborative student-led seminar discussions. Earlier research on student reflections (Feito, 2002) suggested that in successful seminars, participants regularly acknowledge their lack of understanding, offer…