Research in the Teaching of English - Volume 19, Issue 1, 1985

Three levels of metacommunication knowledge and five factors that influence the understanding of speaker meaning in oral language (gestures, intentions, making sense, being “easy to understand,” and “figuring out” what a speaker means) were identified in pilot interviews with children and adolescents. To assess the extent to which these three levels and five factors are generalizable to a large sample, 156 subjects from three age groups (5-7, 8-11, and 13-18 years) were interviewed. Analysis of covariance and Scheffe comparisons indicated significant age group differences. Guttman scale analyses reflected a sequence in levels of metacommunication knowledge.

This study examined cultural and instructional influences on the comprehension of figurative language by elementary school children in Harlem, New York. Specifically, it examined children’s exposure to and participation in the creative, verbal street game called “sounding” or “playing the dozens,” and it studied the effects of a program of creative writing instruction provided by visiting writers. The results indicate that the special instruction tended to improve the figurative language comprehension of the children. Also, those children who frequently engaged in sounding comprehended figurative language better than those who did not. This latter effect could not be accounted for by differences in general language ability. The results are taken as support for a “language experience” view of the development of figurative language comprehension in preference to any strong form of a “cognitive constraints” view.

This study examined the effect of sentence-combining and kernel-identification practice on the syntactic component of sixth graders’ reading comprehension, as measured by a cloze instrument developed by the authors, and by two subtests from the norm-referenced Test of Reading Comprehension (TORC). The experimental group completed eight open sentence-combining exercises, seven kernel-identification exercises, and eight cloze exercises over a 10-week period (two or three exercises per week). The comparison group completed eight cloze exercises during the same period. When covaried by Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills Total Reading scores and by pretest scores on the cloze instrument, results on the immediate posttest administration of the cloze instrument were significantly (p ˂ .001) in favor of the experimental group; results on a 6-week delayed administration of the cloze instrument approached but did not reach significance in favor of the experimental group (p ˂ .07). There was no significant difference between experimental and comparison groups on the two TORC subtests. Since the readability of the cloze instrument was estimated at eighth grade level (due primarily to the use of longer and more complex T-units), it was inferred that sentence-combining and kernel-identification training enabled the experimental group to comprehend longer, syntactically more complex sentences and to exhibit a tendency toward retention of this ability over a 6-week period.

This study investigates the relationship between the oral and written language of one college-level basic-writing student who is a speaker of Vernacular Black English. One possible explanation for basic-writing students’ difficulties in writing is that they may inappropriately use features from their oral language in their written language. We found in this study that neither VBE patterns in the student’s oral language nor other features of orality which previous research has identified primarily account for his writing problems. For other such students, future research will need to explore 1) whether or not the use of oral, or the lack of literate, features account for problems in writing, and 2) the nature of other, as yet unidentified, features of orality and literacy.

The study was conducted to determine whether there is a relationship between problem-discovery and the assessed originality of the written product, and to determine whether problem-finding behavior is observable in student writers. This relationship was examined at two stages: the problem-formulation and problem-solution stages. Two groups of middle school writers, a high creative group and a low creative group, participated in the study. Results indicated a relationship between problem-finding and the originality of the product. The creative group scores were higher, though not always significantly, than the noncreative group scores in a direction one would predict based on correlational research done with artists. The way a student approaches a writing problem is directly related to the originality of the product.

This article differentiates the usages of transaction and interaction as reflections of differing paradigms. The transactional theory of reading is dissociated from information-processing and interactive processing. The implications for research of various concepts basic to the total transactional theory of reading are discussed.