Carl 1986

Carl, Richard. 1986. "Oral and written styles." READ: Promoting Literacy and Literature. Interest level: specialist.

Written style tends to be shorter than spoken style and to lack the redundancies and colloquialisms of speech.

Ruddell's research (1965) shows that students had better comprehension of written passages when structural patterns of written passages were similar to the children's oral language patterns.

Longacre developed a technique to help persons who do not speak the language as their mother tongue uncover a spoken style ("Discourse analysis and literacy," unpublished, 1975).

Carl describes the procedure and lists major structural features to consider, including

• sentence length
• number of combined clauses, and
• devices for opening and closure.

Literacy workers will also want to encourage the development of locally-authored materials. Carl believes the written style should be allowed to develop without instructions from outsiders, but lists things that can be done to aid the process.

• Bibliography module: Carl 1986
• In overview module: Bibliography (Literacy): C
• In modular book: Bibliography (Literacy), by Doris Gallemore, Trudi C. Hunt, Jeanne Swanson, and Stephen L. Walter
• In document collection: Reference materials
• In bookshelf: Literacy

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 4.0, published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 1999. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 18 May 1999

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