While teaching mechanical aspects of writing in English as a second language (ESL) to ten- and eleven-year-olds has been found to be relatively simple, the most difficult thing to teach, and the first to break down when guidance is removed, is logical information sequencing. Without guidance, most children will produce random sentences, but when…

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

A study examined the effects of prior knowledge and the explicitness of text connectivity on various measures of reading ability. Subjects were 130 eighth grade students who read 6 prose passages that had been manipulated for content familiarity and for use of explicit connectives and implied connectives (those brought about by the author's…

Helping students understand coherence in terms of the lexical ties and semantic relations possible between clauses and sentences formalizes an area of writing instruction that has been somewhat vague before and makes the process of creating a coherent paragraph less mysterious. Many students do not have the intuitive knowledge base for absorbing…

This paper presents the results of a quantitative analysis of the historical present tense (HP) in English. The tokens of HP in narrative clauses, such as "he's smiling, an' he picks up the card," are referentially equivalent to their past tense alternants in the phrases, "he was smiling an' he picked up the card." Previous…

Ways in which the study of discourse analysis can aid the teacher of basic writing in helping their students to express themselves fluently are explored in this paper. It is noted that remedial writers need to learn to relate abstract ideas to concrete examples and that they seem unable to supply the connections between ideas, especially those of…

The focus of this experiment was on the effects of associative strength on retention of connected discourse, in terms of both single words and strings of words. Also of interest was the short- and long-term retention of two types of information, verbatim and substance. Verbatim information covered words and word sequences identical to those in the…

The encoding specificity principle predicts that a change in context between input and test will adversely affect recognition memory. Experiment I tested this with sentences from a prose passage and no context effects were obtained. Experiments II, III, and IV compared context effects for words in random sentences versus connected discourse. In…

In the last decade an unprecedented number of college-level foreign students have appeared in the United States, competing with native speakers in schools where the only medium of instruction is English. All students at American universities have to do three kinds of sophisticated writing--summarizing in notes, writing exam essays, and writing…

Five studies were conducted to investigate the relationship between short term memory (STM) and long term memory (LTM), and the relationship between STM and problem solving. In study I, the necessity of postulating separate learning processes for tasks which are traditionally classified as STM tasks as opposed to LTM tasks was investigated.…

Retroactive interference (RI) in prose learning was investigated in an experiment where passages were constructed on the basis of a predetermined logical structure. This structure made it possible to operationally define similarity and assess the effects of RI for inferential information as well as that stated directly in the original passage.…

This study attempted to elucidate the effects of context and level of processing on comprehension and memory for prose. Two aspects of memory for prose were investigated: the amount of information remembered and the semantic interpretation assigned to ambiguous paragraphs. Task instructions and exposure duration of the passages were manipulated to…

Sequence signals may be defined as linguistic forms that ostensively mark connections and relationships between one part of a piece of continuous writing and another. This study demonstrates that a wide range of sequence signals occur in technical writing, and hence must be taught to students who read technical English. (Author)

Describes a psycholinguistic investigation of children's competence in the production of extended discourse, concentrating on discourse form (narrative versus expository) and production modality (written versus spoken). (SKC)

Explains a three-step method of presenting the logical relationships indicated by connecting words (e.g., similarly, however, and therefore) so that developmental students can use them by building upon their understanding of coordinate and subordinate sentences within the paragraph structure. (DMM)