Provides evidence of the existence of serial position and isolation effects in a classroom lecture simulation involving extended meaningful discourse. Isolating an item facilitated learning of that item. (Author/DEP)

Discusses secrecy and disclosure as rhetorical forms, especially as expressed in the archetypal role of translator and in commonplaces. (JK)

Describes two experiments where readers were asked to restore missing actions and physical and mental states to short narratives. Although some deletions resulted in violations of the event chain taxonomy while others did not, in both cases readers used knowledge of possible causal sequences to repair gaps in stories. (Author/MES)

Discusses a pedagogically useful model of text structure in which text structure is mapped as a three-dimensional structure of interconnected T-units, or a discourse matrix. Illustrates and explains a sample discourse matrix and tells why matrix diagraming is more useful than other systems that represent text structure. (FL)

This article represents a poststructuralist critique and review of the role of empathy in the therapeutic relationship. Incorporating Foucauldian contributions, we seek to expand upon the largely liberal-humanistic descriptions about the nature of empathy, which in our view fail to acknowledge fully the impact of culture in the therapy arena. In…

This chapter highlights the central role of experience in learning and consciousness; it also outlines experience-based instructional processes that adult educators can use. (Contains 1 figure.)

In the current debate about the abstractness of children's early grammatical knowledge, Tomasello & Abbott-Smith (2002) have suggested that children might first develop "weak" or "partial" representations of abstract syntactic structures. This paper attempts to characterize these structures by comparing the development of constructions around…

There is a continuing need to investigate how contemporary students in schools are writing the word, and their world, beyond modernist parameters of the page. This article explores the online writing of a senior English world literature class, located in a Western Canadian city, as examined through a recent qualitative case study. Borrowing a 17th…

Although current theories concerning the composing process overlap in useful and interesting ways, a paradigm is emerging. This article discusses two of the major assumptions of this emerging paradigm: that there are distinct purposes for each kind of discourse (for example, expressive, literary, persuasive, and referential) and that the relation…

This paper is directed toward a traditional problem in the analysis of texts, that of finding meaningful linguistic units that are larger than a sentence and smaller than the text itself. Two principles are given for finding extended temporal structures based on the temporal expressions that occur in sentences: a sentence can be captured to form…

Developments in linguistics, particularly in Europe in the work of T.A. Van Dijk, a broader conception of texts that shows promise for the study of reading. Textlinguistics covers a domain of linguistics studies that are involved with texts. Textlinguists are interested not only in those obvious immediate connecting mechanisms, such as anaphora,…

THE 25 LESSONS IN THIS TEXT ARE DESIGNED TO TEACH SPOKEN SANGO TO SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH. THE AUTHOR FEELS THAT WITH SUFFICIENT APPLICATION "A STUDENT OUGHT TO BE ABLE TO SPEAK THE LANGUAGE IN ABOUT THREE MONTHS" AND HE HAS INCLUDED HERE WHAT HE CONSIDERS THE MOST IMPORTANT SANGO GRAMMATICAL MATERIAL AND NON-FRENCH VOCABULARY. GENERALLY THE…

A group of 19 subjects was exposed to a verbal passage for learning that contained associatively related words, while a second group of 19 subjects was exposed to the identical passage but with high association (HA) words replaced by low association (LA) words. A written prompted recall test followed presentation. Group HA had as prompts all of…

A method of analyzing the structure of instructors' verbal statements in terms of the pattern of significant verbal elements in the discourse is described and illustrated by reference to transcripts of science lessons. Directions are provided for calculating the fundamental coefficient of structure (a measure of commonality in successive pairs of…

This study was built on the hypothesis that linguistic cues distinguish the speech of the poor and the ethnically different. Eight samples of connected interview discourse were taken from a two-by-two-by-two matrix of sex, race and social status. The samples were played to groups of elementary, secondary and college students who rated each voice…