A Tagmemic Analysis of Coherence in the Writing of Descriptive Texts by College Students (open access)

A Tagmemic Analysis of Coherence in the Writing of Descriptive Texts by College Students

For this study an attempt was made to bridge the disciplines of linguistics and composition in order to examine factors contributing to textual coherence. Pairs of descriptive texts written by fifty college students were examined in order to identify the factors which differentiate quality and topic. Students were asked to compose a descriptive paragraph on the topic of fall. They were then encouraged to use their five senses, given leaves, and asked to compose a paragraph describing the leaves. The pairs of texts thus elicited were evaluated for preference by readers. The ANOVA revealed a significant difference (p=.001) between the two topics with fall texts preferred over the more specific leaves texts. Results suggest that encouraging students to use their five senses does not improve their writing. It may be more important to move through various levels of abstraction than to merely focus on sensory detail. The texts were also scored holistically by two trained evaluators. Results of this grading were used to choose five high- and five low-coherence texts on each of the two topics. These 20 texts were then analyzed in terms of the tagmemic referential hierarchy. A MANOVA was done to examine the dependent variables of Slot …
Date: August 1988
Creator: Kent, Carolyn E. (Carolyn Elizabeth)
System: The UNT Digital Library
"I Like the Name but Not the Soup!": An Ethnographic Study of the Metalinguistic Sentience of Young Gifted Children, Its Reflection of Their Cognitive Ability and its Relationship to Their Literacy Acquisition and Literacy Learning (open access)

"I Like the Name but Not the Soup!": An Ethnographic Study of the Metalinguistic Sentience of Young Gifted Children, Its Reflection of Their Cognitive Ability and its Relationship to Their Literacy Acquisition and Literacy Learning

Metalinguistic sentience refers to the conscious or unconscious apprehension of, sensitivity to, and attention to language as something with form and function that can be manipulated. This includes, but is not restricted to, conscious or unconscious apprehension of, sensitivity to, and attention to the following aspects of language and literacy: pragmatics, syntactics, semantics, phonology, orthography, morphology, figurative, metalanguage, print "carries" meaning, print conventions, book conventions, text conventions, referent/label arbitrariness, purposes of literacy, and abilities. These aspects of language and literacy are part of a morphological model developed by the author for classifying the evidence provided by children of their metalinguistic sentience. The two other faces of the model, displayed as a cube, depict (1) Literacy Acguisition and Literacy Learning and (2) four Prompt States: Self-, Child-, Adult-, Text. This ethnographic study of nine verbally gifted kindergarten and first grade children was conducted with a three-fold purpose: to explore whether young verbally gifted children's metalinguistic sentience coincided with their cognitive ability, to explore whether young verbally gifted children's metalinguistic sentience influenced their literacy acquisition and literacy learning, and to explore whether young verbally gifted children's literacy acquisition and literacy learning enhanced their metalinguistic sentience. The study took place during a full …
Date: August 1988
Creator: McIntosh, Margaret E.
System: The UNT Digital Library