Betty J. Haslett

Children's strategies for maintaining cohesion in their written and oral stories

This study investigated the use of cohesive referential ties (personals, demonstratives, and comparatives) to maintain textual coherence in the oral and written stories of young children. Overall, a general pattern of usage of cohesive referential ties was maintained regardless of story condition. Oral stories demonstrated more varied cohesive referential ties than did written stories. With increasing age, subjects used significantly more personals and significantly fewer demonstratives (primarily the). Females demonstrated more advanced use of cohesive referential ties than did males. The implications of these findings for facilitating the development of communicative competence among children are discussed.

Acquiring conversational competence

This article focuses on the childs acquisition of conversational competence; in particular, exploring what conversational abilities the child acquires in early interactions with his/her primary caretaker, the mother. It is suggested that the child develops in four distinct areas of competence: first, children begin to understand the value of communication; second, children develop their ability to communicate using conventional signs; third, children develop an appreciation of the requirements of dialogue; and finally, children develop particular communicative styles as a function of interactional opportunities the mother provides. Mothers facilitate their childrens communicative development through interpreting their childrens statements, modeling appropriate communicative behavior, extending their childrens responses, providing opportunities for interaction and finally, demonstrating positive attitudes toward communication.

Dimensions of Teaching Effectiveness

ABSTRACTForty-one semantic differential scales measuring the concept of a good teacher were factor analyzed to assess the general, underlying judgmental dimensions which students use in evaluating effectiveness in teaching. Both high school and college students judged teachers on the dimensions of student/teacher rapport, communicative style, instructional style, and stimulation. A personalization factor, measuring the teacher’s ability to personalize and make relevant class materials, was also found among college students and conceptually distinguished them from the high school students. In addition to class level differences, sex differences across students were also investigated.

The Influence of Student Knowledgeability on Student Ratings of Instruction.

Student knowledgeability, a measure of a students background knowledge and interest in an area of study, was found to significantly influence student ratings of instructors and courses. The higher the level of student knowledge‐ ability, the higher that student rated courses and instructors, regardless of how a particular course/instructor was actually ranked when compared to all other courses/instructors used in the study. This was interpreted as reflecting the highly knowledgeable students’ greater sensitivity to and appreciation of good teaching as well as their ability to minimize the consequences of poor teaching for themselves.

A study of young children's sentence comprehension ability

This study examines childrens sentence comprehension by determining the relative effect which training sessions involving helpful linguistic and visual‐linguistic contexts have on improving childrens ability to comprehend reversible passive sentences. The results suggest that the positive effect which helpful visual contexts have on sentence comprehension is limited to immediate sentence comprehension and that childrens ability to comprehend reversible passive sentences is developmental. The results support the position that young children have difficulty comprehending reversible passive sentences because they have not yet mastered the syntactic strategies needed to decode such structures.