The foregoing quote by Haddon Robinson, a preacher and professor of preaching, underscores the necessary relationship between hermeneutics and homiletics. It is a relationship also recognized by others outside the area of sermon preparation and delivery. For instance, David Dockery comments: “Our understanding of hermeneutics, or the task of interpretation, focuses on discovering the historical...

The present study aims to explore the role of Chinese EFL learners’ rhetorical strategy use in relation to their achievement in English writing in Taiwan. It has been argued that traditional Chinese text structures (indirect style) continue to influence the contemporary English writing of Chinese students in expository writing text. The manner of Chinese communication style and the origin of tr...

An overview of TOPIC is provided, a knowledge-based text information system for the analysis of Germanlanguage texts. TOPIC supplies text condensates (summaries) on variable degrees of generality and makes available facts acquired from the texts. The presentation focuses on the major methodological principles underlying the design of TOPIC: a frame representation model that incorporates various...

In this study, we compared four expert graders with latent semantic analysis (LSA) to assess short summaries of an expository text. As is well known, there are technical difficulties for LSA to establish a good semantic representation when analyzing short texts. In order to improve the reliability of LSA relative to human graders, we analyzed three new algorithms by two holistic methods used in...

This paper presents TextTiling, a method for partitioning full-length text documents into coherent multiparagraph units. The layout of text tiles is meant to reflect the pattern of subtopics contained in an expository text. The approach uses lexical analyses based on tf.idf, an information retrieval measurement, to determine the extent of the tiles, incorporating thesaural informationvia a stat...

Many students with learning disabilities (LD) experience difficulties with extracting relationships from expository text, especially if they are implicit. Results from studies with K-12 participants have been inconclusive regarding the potency of the graphic organizer (GO) as a comprehension tool. This study attempted to address some of the concerns with GO research by examining the effects of ...