Emergent bilingual children express their ideas in written language through meaningful marks on a page by leveraging their oral language and print focused skills from home and school languages. Because writing is a complex task, particularly for children learning more than one language, teachers must make decisions about how they guide children…

How can social change become possible when secondary teachers approach argument as participation in ongoing conversations? The authors illustrate how--through writing, speaking, and reading to develop a letter to their principal arguing for a school policy change--secondary students participated in multiple conversational spheres across time and…

Writing is a change process. In writing, one clarifies his/her thoughts. When one shares his/her writing with others, they take one's ideas and contribute their own. And through this exchange of ideas they are both changed. It's clear that speaking and writing serve different purposes. Here, with the help of some "Exchange" authors, the author…

A subcommittee of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Executive Committee wrote the "NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing" in 2004. In over a decade since, the everyday experience of writing in people's lives has expanded dramatically. Increasingly, handheld devices are important instruments for people's writing,…

The author first learned about the Shared Journal approach as a doctoral student in the mid-1980s, and she implemented it in her own kindergarten class with great success. Two decades later, she was listening as her own graduate students introduced themselves and described their experiences with teaching writing. A young kindergarten teacher…

This paper surveys some of the changes in teaching the four language skills in the past 15 years. It focuses on two main changes for each skill: understanding spoken language and willingness to communicate for speaking; product, process, and genre approaches and a focus on feedback for writing; extensive reading and literature for reading; and…

Surveys of employers continually highlight the need for better communication skills among recent college graduates. Yet, writing instruction in higher education serves far more than a transactional purpose. Writing facilitates learning, helps students gain skills in analysis and synthesis, and supports a range of other personal and intellectual…

Much has been made by early childhood educators about the importance of activities that foster early reading--and deservedly so--but studies show that reading and writing are skills that children develop simultaneously. Early reading is supported and improved by early writing. Young children need reading to help them learn about writing, and they…

Presents a review of cognitive psychology research dealing with the organization and functioning of oral and written language production mechanisms. Discusses works dealing with the microstructural aspects of language, primarily oral production. Describes how the research perspective has evolved from modular to connectionist models. Examines the…

By investigating the similarities and differences between speech and writing, teachers can help students mature as writers. The difference between speech and writing in conveying meaning is explained by the degree of context dependence of the utterance or passage. Speech is highly context-dependent because a speaker depends on a listener to assist…

A teacher of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) writing describes how attempting to understand Malay students' cultural oral orientation helped her to understand their writing processes and needs and to incorporate such aspects into the ESL writing program. (12 references) (CB)

Describes a project designed to teach elementary students to write interactive stories using an authoring system called Story Tree. Benefits of the project are discussed, including the development of oral language, listening, reading, and writing skills; and problems with the authoring system, the writing process, and the curriculum integration…

Articles in this journal issue focus primarily on evaluation in the language arts and oral communication. Following an introduction to the two themes, the articles discuss the following: (1) pop quizzes in literature, (2) holistic scoring, (3) self-evaluation strategies in prewriting and rewriting, (4) what not to do in student/teacher…

Focusing on future directions for English and reading research, the papers presented in this book examine the complex interplay of skills, processes, and classroom conditions that influence the development of children's competence in reading, writing, and the language arts. The titles and authors of the essays are as follows: (1) "Reading and…