The purpose of this study was to describe international perspectives concerning terms, definitions, and meanings of adapted physical activity (APA) as (a) activities or service delivery, (b) a profession, and (c) an academic field of study. Gergen's social constructionism, our theory, guided analysis of multiple sources of data via qualitative…

A study examined the effects of (1) providing students with instruction in a "discourse-structure" reading and writing strategy on college freshmen's recall and comprehension of history textbook passages; and (2) this procedure on the quality of students' expository writing. Subjects, 126 college freshmen, randomly assigned to one of…

Ethical issues make writing assignments more than academic exercises, especially when the ethical issues involve the writing itself. Such issues arise in every aim and mode of discourse and in every stage of the writing process, from choosing a topic to editing the final draft. Informative discourse must be factual and comprehensive, and have…

Designed to assess immediate and delayed comprehension of expository prose, this instrument is a 40-item multiple-choice test composed of open-ended stems, each followed by four nonoverlapping choices. Control of content of the items was based upon an analysis of the accompanying 1,300-word passage on the Kalahari Desert. Validity, reliability,…

A study was undertaken to demonstrate that expository prose written in Indian English exhibits certain characteristics determined by the sociocultural conventions of writing in the Indian tradition. These features of Indian English texts are often judged to be inappropriate by native speakers of North American and British English, and mistakenly…

An approach to teaching expository writing in English as a Second Language (ESL) to native speakers of Chinese is offered. It is based on a comparison and classification of rhetorical patterns in the two languages. Chinese rhetoric contains a wide variety of methods of presentation, including both direct and indirect, or metaphoric, forms. It is…

Presents an experimental primary trait rubric designed to assess a writer's support for an argument, and structured as an eleven-cell grid on which a rater can plot a student's score. Describes the grid, and its use in a study of 1,892 eleventh-grade essays. Also describes ways to use the grid to teach invention and arrangement. (JG)

The purpose of this book is twofold: to present important coherence models and to suggest how insights from coherence theory and research can be introduced to the classroom. The book is organized into four sections: theoretical overview, coherence models, studies of student writing, and pedagogical approaches. Articles include: "Seven Problems in…