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This study investigated the assumption that proficient writers, unlike nonproficient ones, adapt their essays for a particular and occasion. Good and poor writers wrote a persuasive essay for a real that expressed topic-relevant attitudes and opinions in an interview presentation. Essays were then coded for ideas mentioned in the interview. Results showed that good writers take greater advantage of information than poor writers, but that good and poor writers both favor adaptations from explicit statements over more subtle statements. Studies of in human communication help to show how individuals manage in a world of diverse attitudes and opinions. Researchers in related disciplines, recognizing that effective discourse requires an understanding of situation including aspects of have shown many ways that people alter their messages for different contexts. In the field of writing, however, situational influences have received relatively little attention, though today's textbooks devote many more pages than before to matters of and intention. Overall, there seems to be little consensus about just how aspects of are manifested in writing. I use the term here and elsewhere as a general term to denote issues of awareness and adaptation. Where necessary, I distinguish between awareness, which refers to a writer's or speaker's focus of on readers or listeners irrespective of the communicator's language behavior, and adaptation, which refers to the audience-conditioned language behavior resulting from this awareness. What constitutes adaptation and how it can be measured is a question not always faced squarely by researchers. Some investigators have adopted quite general (and vague) criteria. In a study conducted by Flower and Hayes (1980), for example, categories labeled audience and reader and response to the larger rhetorical problem were used in analyzing protocols for evidence of awareness. Similarly, Hilgers (1980) rated adaptation in students' writing samples according to the criterion attention to the specific needs of the audience. This article is adapted from the author's doctoral dissertation from the Department of Language Education, University of Georgia, 1984, under the direction of Donald L. Rubin. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 19, No. 3, October 1985

The discussion of the nature and role of so-called “dialect, interference” in writing has been carried on in a literature which has failed to define its terms consistently, reported experimental results for poorly defined samples, and assumed much that has yet to be established empirically. Written partially as a response to Patrick Hartwell’s 1980 RTE article on the same topic, this paper examines these flaws in the literature of dialect interference in greater detail, examines the seven “correlates” of Hartwell’s “print code hypothesis” and finds them wanting or uninstructive, and sets forth suggestions for a more sophisticated study of this issue.

Conventional empirical approaches often fail to deal with important dimensions of children's response to literature, such as the demand for repetition and successive responses, nonverbal modes of responding, and the nature of spontaneous expressions of response. In this study, using techniques borrowed from ethnography, a participant observer spent four months in one elementary school working with 90 children in three classrooms spanning kindergarten through grade five. Behaviors that revealed some connection between children and literature were identified and categorized as response events, with attention to their juxtaposition and sequence in the classroom. The distribution of these events across grade levels and qualitative differences in relation to age reflected familiar patterns of language and cognitive development. The occurrence and expression of response events, however, and some aspects of their quality, were tied to the social-instructional contexts of the various classrooms and were susceptible to the influence of the teachers who created those settings.

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The developmental nature of the reflective concept of in young children (ages 4.0 to 1.8) was investigated, and the degree to which these developmental aspects of metalinguistic awareness correspond to levels of cognitive development as described by Piaget (preoperational, transitional, and cognitive operational) was studied. Results showed that conscious awareness of the structural and significatory aspects of words follow what Papandropoulou and Sinclair have termed a long and slow elaboration characterized by an initial inexact notion equating a with the totality of an utterance to the conceptualization of word in terms of component letters. It is suggested that the printed word, by virtue of being stable, ilobjectified referent, plays significant role in turning the child's conscious attention to language as an opaque object of study. Implications for instruction are offered. In order to deal with the requirements of most programs of beginning instruction, children must be able to step back and treat language as an object that can be studied in its own right; they must be metalinguistically aware (e.g., Mattingly, 1972; Gleitman & Rozin, 1973). Challenged by the need to identify necessary prerequisites for undertaking formal instruction, researchers have sought to determine young children's ability to deal analytically with language. If cracking the is an integral part of the acquisition of reading, then necessary prerequisite for the neophyte reader is to grasp the understanding that there in fact exists code that needs to be cracked. This conceptual understanding of the nature and purpose of is not given for many young children (Downing, 1976; Vernon, 1971); they may not share their teachers' understanding of what reading is (Reid, 1966) much less what terms such as word, sentence, and sound refer to (Francis, 1973). For example, first grade teacher's request to Tell me which word doesn't The authors wish to express their appreciation to Pamela Lemer for her assistance in the collection of the data, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the original draft of this article.

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Children receive messages from many sources, including the printed word. It is generally assumed that they are less able than an adult to evaluate either the accuracy or the quality of a communication; and consequently, that children may be more readily influenced by messages than are adults. The number of trade books and textbooks printed annually has risen sharply over the last few decades, so that there are many messages available for study. In view of the influence and quantity of written communications for children, the process by which messages are transmitted to and modified for young readers should be comprehensively described. Nevertheless, although some research has dealt with content of materials, a few studies with censorship, and several others with children's response to literature, each phase has been investigated only in isolation. This study proposes a comprehensive model for communications research focusing upon printed messages published for juvenile audiences. The model is then applied to the specific case of world-future images in children's fiction. Suppose that we regard futurists as message originators and children as one group of receivers. Then authors and publishers may play roles as gatekeepers, those persons who screen communications between originators and recipients. We want to know whether the full range of alternative futures generated by futurists is reflected in the range of world-future images in children's literature. We want to know whether the gatekeepers of children's fiction modify worldfuture images so as to eliminate, or at least ameliorate, the harshest possibilities. These aspects of the proposed communications model are investigated in the present study.

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This study was a response to the current movement to introduce more Canadian content into the literature curriculum of Canadian schools. It examined the assumptions behind the movement by asking three main questions: (1) To what extent are Vancouver students able to recognize Canadian poems? (2) Do Vancouver students respond to Canadian poems in a way that is measurably different from their response to other poems? (3) Do any such differences in response depend upon information extrinsic to the poems—such as that provided in the label "A Canadian Poem"—and thus derive from attitudes established prior to the reading of a particular poem rather than, or as well as, from an encounter with the poem itself? These questions were shown to relate to important general questions about student response to literature, especially those bearing upon the relationship between a literary work and the world known to the reader. The design (a fully crossed 2x2 "factorial" with 12 replications) provided that twenty-four Vancouver grade eleven classes listen to taped recordings of a pair of unfamiliar poems and, concurrently, read them privately. The students were then asked to respond to the poems freely, in writing. There were twelve poem pairs, each pair consisting of one Canadian poem and one New Zealand poem. All poems represented landscapes. Each pair was presented to two different classes (in reversed order to counter order effects). The Canadian poem set was refined by sampling half from British Columbia and half from other Canadian regions. Separate analysis was made of responses to each poem sub-group. Each class was divided, randomly, in two. The Canadian poem in the pair that was given to one class sub-group was labelled as Canadian. The New Zealand poem in the same pair was labelled as Non-Canadian. The same Canadian and New Zealand poems given to the other class sub-group were not so labelled. The responses were subjected to content analysis by a scheme designed for the study. Its reliability by percentage overlap was 91.5%. Analysis was descriptive, with the Chi-Square statistic assisting description. A number of supporting instruments were employed to make possible various finer comparisons and to yield data for future research. Of the research questions, the first and second were answered negatively: little discriminatory recognition and little response difference were detected. The third question was answered positively: there was considerable evidence that students, when they knew the origins of the Canadian poems, favoured those poems in a variety of response dimensions (such as Evaluation, Comprehension, Visualisation, and Involvement). Regional differences did exist, the British Columbia poems being less favoured than the other Canadian poems. The attempt to establish a working base for ongoing exploration was successful. Statistically significant and/or important findings emerged in several areas. Some were: the adjectival pairs students used in characterizing their responses to the poems; stated preferences between poems; the effects on response when there is strong "transfer" between the poem and what is familiar to the student; and the students' desire for more Canadian literature in their schools. The study concluded with a statement of implications for curriculum planning and teaching strategy, and some suggestions for future research.

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Of the three segments of the English curriculum, language, literature, and composition, the stepchild seems to be composition. Few English teachers are likely to prefer teaching composition to literature, and composition seems to be most often neglected (Squire and Applebee, 1968) . Of the thirty-six English teachers who participated in the study reported here, only four preferred to teach composition. Since both the teaching and the evaluation of writing are so often frustrating experiences and the results of hours and even years of instruction so often unrewarding when the end product is considered; it is not difficult to sympathize with English teachers' preference for teaching literature instead of composition. At the same time, English teachers have complained of the general lack of research in the area of composition, such insufficiency making their task even more difficult and frustrating because of their need for specific evidence that might corroborate their practices, provide new insights, or give them direction for new or different approaches to the teaching and evaluation of writing. Attempts to measure the effectiveness of instruction in composition or the quality of the writing produced thereby are more often discouraging than rewarding because of the subjective nature of the task, the many variables involved,

In 1968, Alan Purves and Victoria Rippere published their ground-breaking study, The Elements Writing about a Literary Work, in which they proposed a new system for content analysis response to literature. Beginning with published writings of numerous critics from the time Aristotle, continuing with a pool critical statements about one work provided by contemporary scholars and critics, and finally refining the system on the basis essays drawn from students in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and Belgium, Purves and Rippere shifted the focus analysis from the correctness or accuracy a stated response to its content or subject. The which they proposed for analyzing response ranged from such literary devices as allusion and irony to general statements thematic importance or identification 139 elements in all, combined into 24 subcategories and 5 categories (engagement-involvement, perception, interpretation, evaluation,, and miscellaneous). The elements, presented with careful instructions for their use, illustrative studies, and the necessary reliability data, filled a methodological void and helped both to stimulate and to focus a nascent interest in research in response

Two years later Stanley Edgar Hyman roundly voiced the wish for an ideal integration of all modern critical methods into one super method (Hyman, 1955) [p. 388]. Near the end of the next decade, in 1968, a pamphlet appeared under the sponsorship of the NCTE Committee on Research, Alan G. Purves's Elements of Writing about a Literary Work: A Study of Response to Literature. This was a schema which organized statements respondents made about literary works into four main categories: