Discourse analysis and therapy: Some finetuning requested

Abstract

In their leading paper, Penn and colleagues describe a discourse therapy as applied to two patients suffering from mild aphasia. This hierarchical discourse therapy (HDT) has originally been developed by Biggs and Collis (1982) to improve students' discussion abilities at an abstract level. The method is based on the assumption that the level of response complexity is directly related to text comprehension. Penn et al. apply HDT to patients with a linguistic deficit to improve their discourse comprehension and to change their response pattern by making them aware of the inference processes as distinguished by Biggs and Collis.