As predicted, foods from categories typical of most people's restaurant schemata (conceptual framework) were better recalled by undergraduates who read a restaurant narrative, than those reading about supermarkets, a less structured schemata. Findings confirm Ausubel's notion that information which fits slots in a conceptual framework is more…

Examines referential functions of demonstratives in Chinese discourse. Findings indicate that use of the zero-demonstrative in Chinese is the unmarked form of reference roughly corresponding to the referential function of "the" or "it" in English. Demonstratives in Chinese are a marked form of reference roughly corresponding to…

The distribution of a small number of syntactic structures in the speech output of 102 Israeli preschoolers was examined. Findings are reported on the proportion of grammatically analyzable clauses, the patterning of word order in Hebrew child language, and the emergence of syntactic connectedness through coordination and subordination of clauses.…

Building on a broad concept of workplace wellbeing, this paper suggests a cohesive framework for the research and practice of workplace learning and development of human resources and proposes that synergies between these fields should be better acknowledged. There are three major concerns behind the proposition: a taken-for-granted approach to…

Results show that the theme of a story can be used as a mnemonic device to improve recall. To be effective, the theme must be available to S for encoding during input. (Authors)

Points out that if relationships between sentences are made implicit (for the sake of simplicity or readability), comprehension may suffer and explains three teaching strategies for improving students' comprehension of implicit connectives. (RL)

The most frequently noted difference in the abilities of tenth graders and college seniors to recall sentence connectives was the college students' ability to engage in free recall and rewriting, indicating that such a task would be a good predictor of mature use of transformational sentence connectives in the study of English. (JD)

Studies the kinds of errors made by American learners of Russian, the reasons for these errors, change in error patterns, and resemblance between the errors of foreign and primary language learners. (42 references) (CK)

This study, involving 16 intermediate-grade children with mild mental retardation, 29 children with learning disabilities, and 37 children without disabilities, found that all groups recalled cohesive story versions better than noncohesive versions. Statements in the stories' causal chain were better recalled than statements not in the causal…

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…

This article profiles a group of college students with learning disabilities, outlines strategies used to help those students in their 100-level expository-writing class, and illustrates persistent writing problems with three student writing samples. This study revealed that, even with explicit support, students whose learning disabilities had an…

This paper proposes that a metaphor of linguistic levels, similar to that used in general linguistic theory, be applied to the study of levels within an essay. The linguistic conception of levels in a piece of writing is not sentence-paragraph-essay (which might be characterized as a rhetorical division) but rather (or in addition to)…

Noting that although some children read aloud with apparent fluency, they fail to understand fully or remember connected discourse, this book brings together research on children who have a specific comprehension deficit. The book first provides an introduction and overview of adult and child text comprehension, and then describes the research.…

A study investigated the exophoric function of the pronouns "it, they, he, she" and related forms in four English conversations. It analyzed the frequency and characteristics of the occurrence of those exophoric pronouns and found that they were much less frequent than endophoric pronouns. It also found that the exophoric pronoun groups…