The academic register of English language has been thought of as a challenging cognitive and pedagogical endeavour for non-native university students whether their L2 educational context is domestic or international. To facilitate the acquisition of academic language, several approaches were proposed over years, chief among which are Computer…

Ten randomly picked children of prekindergarten age participated in a study that focused on whether feature analysis can be used as an aid in the recognition of the alphabet. The five children in the control group were introduced to the letters as a whole, while the five children in the experimental group were introduced to the whole letters but…

The purpose of this study was to analyze differences in children's written questions by means of the theoretical model of transformational-Generative grammar. Eight questions written by children in grades 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9 comprised the nucleus of this study. The eight questions were chosen from a larger group of questions and separated into…

The rhetorical model for improving the basic writing skills of college students is presented from three perspectives. As a diagnostic tool, the model isolates five areas of concern for the developing communicator: surfacing tacit awareness, broadening perception, broadening the communicative repertoire, developing analytical and evaluative skills,…

Recording, narrative, exposition, and argument were hypothesized to present writing tasks of increasing cognitive and verbal complexity. This was investigated by obtaining writing samples in each mode from a stratified sample of 128 Australian sixteen year olds. The cognitive-complexity hypothesis was supported by data concerning the relative…

The purposes of this study were to see if an objective composition test could be constructed that would correlate positively with grades on written compositions and to investigate the effects of native language background and total language proficiency on written composition skills. The objective composition test that was constructed consisted of…

The study investigated the effectiveness of a flexible modular system for teaching composition. It was hypothesized that measures of compositional ability would significantly favor students in the experimental course, and students in the experimental course would register significantly higher in affective measures of interest and involvement. The…

In this study, a comparison was made between the achievement scores in English usage of students who were assigned English classes during their last two years of high school and the scores of students who elected English classes. The 667 participants in this study were members of the 1970 and 1972 graduating classes at Aviation High School,…

The problem of this study was to find criteria, and a model, for judging written expression at the elementary level which can produce concordance of teacher judgments and be a possible basis for prescriptive teaching. Such a model was developed by the Affton School District. This study attempts to determine its utility. Twenty-four essays were…

Applying the principles of American Pragmatism to college composition offers a solution to the general problems of program design, syllabi development, instructional effectiveness, and student behavior modification. American Pragmatism involves the classic problems of meaning and knowledge. These problems stem from the linguistic possibility of…

This study undertook an examination of how specific rhetorical training in visual literacy would improve the ability of college freshmen to clearly state a thesis, to carefully shape an argument, to deliberately substantiate the argument with examples, and to skillfully express ideas with appropriately varied sentence structure. The hypotheses…

This guide for a course in communication includes five chapters. The first chapter discusses the need for oral communication as part of the freshman English program. The second chapter includes an annotated bibliography of articles and books related to communication and communication courses, a summary of the four basic communication skills…

This dissertation describes a study of the Black English Vernacular (BEV) based on 350 compositions written in the college classroom by 42 black students from working class and lower class families in a predominantly white university. The correlation between certain extralinguistic variables and over 20 linguistic variables was examined. Although…

This study examines the effects of various combinations of teaching methods on unstructured written responses to poetry. The methods involved were studying short films related to the poems, listening to audio-tapes of the poems, and discussing poems in class. These three variables were combined in a 2 x 2 x 2 design. The subjects were 324 twelfth…

This report presents ideas on the use of poetry in teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. Chapter 1 describes beliefs about language and language learning, and offers a theoretical justification for including the reading and writing of poetry in the language classroom. Chapter 2 is a collection of poetry activities that have been…