Analyzes extracts of classroom discourse involving teachers and groups of nine-year-olds in terms of what they reveal about the establishment of shared knowledge between teacher and students. Identifies this shared knowledge with the discourse "context," focusing on how classroom events are recalled and reconstructed. (MM)

Reviews several theoretical perspectives and presents data pertinent to what makes a story likable. Examines the contribution of two story characteristics to adults' and elementary students' ratings of story liking and storyhood: the importance of the goal the protagonist pursues and the difficulty of attaining that goal. (JAD)

Explores how agoraphobia is realized through the activity of storytelling. Analyzes one agoraphobic woman's narrative to articulate the narrative structuring of a panic episode, the grammatical resources systematically recruited to portray panic as unaccountable and the protagonist as irrational and helpless, and a recurrent communicative dilemma…

Investigates the reading comprehension skills of 34 college students, particularly the roles of basic reading processes and prior knowledge in understanding expository texts. Indicates that word identification and propositional encoding measures were related to individual differences in reading comprehension ability. (HB)

Investigates the pragmatic input of parents and the ways it contributes to preschoolers' acquisition of pragmatic competence (the appropriate use of language in social situations). Analyzes audiotapes of five families' interactions over a one-year period. Discusses results of research and offers insight into preschoolers' growth in pragmatic…

Explores the kinds of persuasion used by preschool children in two role-playing tasks. Finds that children role played effectively and persistently, with Bargains and Guarantees the most frequently used strategies. Finds that the choice of strategies changed with age (more Positive Sanction, less Assertion) and with sex (boys used more Norm…

Explores how undergraduate readers take the protagonist's mental perspective in stories involving conflicting beliefs about a situation. Demonstrates that readers with privileged information build emotional inference corresponding to the protagonist's (wrong) beliefs; inferences related to protagonist's beliefs are backward inferences at the text…

Contributes to research on child-directed speech by examining the use of two types of utterances (reported speech and prompts) in interactions involving mothers, toddlers, and other adults or siblings in rural Senegal. Shows that mothers attempt to promote exchange in a triadic framework, with the goal of making the child part of a complex set of…

Examines the discourse of a problem-based learning group in medicine. Identifies ethnomethodological conversation analysis to analyze a segment of interaction in a problem-based learning (PBL) meeting. Observes that the presentation of a theory makes relevant a variety of sequential activities through which participants in this instructional…

Examines the discourse of a problem-based learning group in medicine. Uses a conceptual distinction between linguistic (and other semiotic) resources for making typological (or categorical) versus topological (or continuous variation) meanings as part of a multimedia semiotic analysis of the data episode. (SR)

Examines the discourse of a problem-based learning group in medicine. Finds evidence of similarity in the way that medical students and family members converse. Finds a paradox arising when activities of technoscience and ordinary conversation are rendered in ways that make them indistinguishable without extrinsic reference to who people are or to…

Investigates how readers use predication for the interpretation of referents in text and to develop a coherent model of the events described in text. Illustrates how two types of predication (scalar copredication and antipredication) induce readers to disambiguate the referents of definite noun phrases in essentially the opposite way, with…

Identifies various speech styles of English as marked by stance adverbials. Indicates that the discourse functions of stance adverbials differ considerably from the functions suggested by their literal meanings. (JK)

Focuses on courtroom speech as it occurs when a lay person interacts with an attorney and proposes a framework that includes a (1) macrostructural description of direct and cross-examination sequences as contexts that condition the interaction, and (2) microanalytical model that accounts for the effectiveness of the question-and-answer examination…

Reports the results of a study showing that one stylistic feature, the inclusion of connectives other than "and/then" is a good predictor of explanation in five- to ten-year-olds, but a straightforward lack of linguistic resources is not necessarily what limits older children's achievement of explanatory narrative. (HTH)