Talk between students and their teachers is central to learning at school, yet students' competence is often understood as the outcome of instructional talk rather than essential to successful participation in instructional talk. Curriculum frameworks used to attribute students with levels of competence reflect these understandings. This article…

Describes how kindergarten children use invented spelling to rewrite Mother Goose nursery rhymes, indicating the phoneme grapheme system the children perceived from spoken language. (HTH)

Describes a two-day residence in a fifth- and sixth-grade classroom of poet Arnold Adoff. Presents his interaction with five students as they struggle with their poetry writing. (HTH)

A year-long study of the writing development of 27 first through third graders in an English/Spanish bilingual program was conducted during the 1980-81 school year. Samples of the children's writing were collected at four intervals, coded for computer tallying, and analyzed in terms of code-switching, spelling, punctuation and segmentation,…

The Highland (Indiana) public schools developed a writing program for elementary school students based on the premise that children learn to use language by actively generating language. The program features language production as the principal student activity in the English class and uses the students' own written work and oral expression as the…

Intended for parents and teachers who are interested in the approximate level at which their primary school-age children should be writing, this document describes the type of writing children at each age can produce and how they go about producing it. An introduction makes this point and offers a set of writing process terms to describe…

Exploring questions about how the classroom environment affects young learners, this book describes how young children from various cultural and linguistic backgrounds have coped with the conditions surrounding them in process oriented writing classrooms. Chapter 1 describes the kinds of activities in which children engage in seemingly chaotic…