This handbook seeks to provide a practical, readable guide to teaching writing across a broad range of ages and grade levels (K-8). The handbook's seven chapters cover each stage of the writing process in detail, from setting a purpose for writing to drafting, revising, editing, and producing a "finished" product. Its goal is to provide…

Students who visit writing labs are often inexperienced writers who need help and even prescriptive teaching. Although some compositionists are leery of including prescriptive help among possible teaching strategies, the writing lab tutor's position as advisor rather than judge helps students accept the suggestions as the options they are. As…

To write cohesively means doing many things at once--wrestling with ideas, balancing form and function, pushing words this way and that, attending to syntax and diction, and employing imagery and metaphor until a coherent message emerges. Though full of promise, student writing typically lacks cohesion, and the question is whether the fault lies…

The most used model for empirical research on the writing process is based on cognitive psychology and does not take into account affective phenomena, although it has long been recognized that affect (that is, the noncognitive aspects of mental activity) plays a large role in writing and learning to write. To understand the complete picture, it is…

This 20-minute videotape program presents poet and Columbia University professor Kenneth Koch conducting a poetry workshop with a small group of fourth and fifth graders. The program's notes explain that Koch believes that students should be allowed to write poetry in the same way that they are allowed to dance and sing--with freedom,…

This paper discusses ideas which contribute to better understanding of the writing portions of Reading Recovery lessons, emphasizing the importance of helping the student monitor meaning during the composing and recoding process. Topics addressed in the paper are: (1) differences between composing and transcribing; (2) sources from which children…

This book, part of a series which serve as guides for K-12 teachers who are striving to align lively, classroom-tested practices with standards, gathers together brief articles spotlighting suggestions for effective instruction. Beginning with activities that help students think through the audience and purpose for their writing, this book offers…

This review of the University of Maryland's research program in written language indicates that the writing difficulties of students with learning disabilities stem, in part, from problems with basic text production skills, scant knowledge about writing, and difficulties with planning and revising text. The effectiveness of various instructional…

This book provides insight into the interrelationship among students' writing, their thinking about their writing processes, and the language of instruction. It offers information on both common and diverse patterns of understanding among children experiencing the same instructional program and explores the influence of instructional language on…

This digest offers an overview of current research in the ERIC database on methods and measurements for evaluating student writing. The digest considers: (1) methods of response to students' written products; and (2) the measurement of quality as represented by effective classroom teaching methods. (SR)

Research-based recommendations for an effective writing instruction program for exceptional students include, among others, allocate a sufficient amount of instruction time; expose students to a broad range of writing tasks; integrate writing with other academic subjects; develop the processes of planning, sentence generation, and revising; and…

This book, part of a series which serve as guides for K-12 teachers who are striving to align lively, classroom-tested practices with standards, gathers together brief articles spotlighting suggestions for effective instruction. The organization and the contents of this book on motivating writing suggest an intriguing profile of how middle school…

This article explains the Integrated Strategies Instruction Model by analyzing the problems of ineffective writers and presenting instructional techniques for framing, applying, and extending students' understanding of the executive strategy. A vignette from an eighth-grade history classroom illustrates the guidelines. Research regarding the…

Intermediate grade students with learning disabilities learned to work in pairs to help each other with editing and revising of their compositions. The 13 subjects made more revisions and produced papers of higher quality when revising with peer support than did 16 students in a process-approach control group. (Author/JDD)

Following a major policy statement on writing in the primary school, this document employs a threefold approach to examining the teaching difficulties involved in responding to children's writing. The first section considers expectations that teachers have of children as writers, children's intended meanings, and various kinds of responses to…