In the history of scholarship on vernacular style, rhetoric, and prose rhythm, very little space has been given to 14th-century Tuscan short stories writers, such as Ser Giovanni, Franco Sacchetti, Giovanni Sercambi. This article analyzes Giovanni’s Pecorone with aim individuating stylistic, rhetorical, rhythmic elements understanding their relationship its model, Boccaccio’s Decameron. Althoug...

This study investigated if different response formats (test methods) measure reading comprehension of expository text differently. The study was conducted with 48 semester 6 TESL students at a university in Selangor, Malaysia. These students received an expository passage having descriptive rhetorical structure followed by three response formats, namely, incomplete outline, graphic organizer, a...

Children’s language acquisition is normally explained either in biological, nativist or in functionalist and usage based terms. The main thesis of this article is that rhetorical terminology introduced by Aristotle is fruitful for our understanding of the development process children go through when learning language. Introducing rhetoric to descriptions of children’s language acquisition presu...

Reading comprehension can be seen as a process dependent on the interaction of 'topdown' and 'bottom-up' processes. An important, but neglected, feature of this process concerns the effects of rhetorical organization. This article describes an experiment in which four rhetorically different texts, with identical subject matter, were read by 490 Hong Kong Chinese school children (mean age 14.1),...

In conclusion, we should like to add two admonitions. First, criticism is an art, not the raw tables or summaries of scholarship. The scholarship is a necessary prerequisite, and the formal reports, the compilations of the learned monograph, are essential to criticism. We have too much of unimaginative word counting, the pedestrian assemblage of arguments, the methodical and generalized comment...