Most students avoid the reflective nature the writing process requires. Their resistance to meta-cognition, thinking about one's thinking, often means they are incapable of capitalizing on their strengths or improving upon their weaknesses. The author believes students who are familiar with writers' lives and habits will be that much more…

This document is a guide that a science teacher might prepare for students with the help of an English teacher. The first section provides a rationale for the guide and discusses types of writing done in science classes and the ways this booklet might help students. Guidelines are delineated for answering study guide questions, writing essays, and…

Three studies suggest that students involved in observational activities increase the level of specificity in their writing after only 10 to 15 days of instruction and are judged to be more creative. (DD)

Describes a program in which five children (ages 8-13), including two with profound deafness, were taught English using whole language strategies combined with mini lessons in grammatical structure. The lessons were reinforced with assigned written language practice for classwork and homework, which was incorporated into the students' journals.…

This document outlines an approach to secondary school composition instruction, using wordless picture books. Specific published textless books are discussed as aids in stimulating imagination, tapping the need for sense impressions, developing sequences of events, teaching transition and the passage of time, demonstrating point of view, making…

Level 2 of the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) Composition Skills Program is designed to help children achieve writing fluency and elementary punctuation skills. This report describes the results of the 1971-1972 developmental tryouts of the program in a wide range of school locations. Data obtained from the tryout corroborated data obtained…

The word "authorship," like "ownership" or "professorship," reflects an appropriate and necessary connection between authors and their texts. First used in 1710, the concept of authorship is a relatively recent invention. To understand how constructed the concept is--not commonsensical or inevitable but a complex…

Intended for use by teachers, librarians, and others interested in helping college students produce well-written term papers, this collection of materials was prepared by librarians as a result of their work in a term paper writing clinic. The first item in the collection is a description and evaluation report of the term paper clinic. The report…

A study documenting and describing dialogue journal writing in a group of nine tenth graders in an Australian secondary school English class is reported. The overall purpose was to understand the nature of dialogue journal writing and to assess its value as a suitable mode of encouraging writing among secondary students. Specific aspects of…

The poetry unit presented in this paper is designed to teach high school students how to write poetry through personal observation, journal writing, and small group discussion. Using the unit, students progress through the stages of writing according to the following steps: observing a familiar person and noting words and phrases about that…

Produced as part of a collaborative research project in which classroom teachers teamed with university-based research assistants to explore questions raised by the teachers in the course of their work with students, this monograph deals with the issue of "occasion." Following a review of theory and research about aspects of occasion…

Reports on a survey of college freshmen concerning how their high school teachers prepared them or could have prepared them better for college writing expectations. Reviews results that suggest that those students who wrote the least scored the lowest in college placement exams. (TB)

Current literature indicates a growing interest in the development of individualized, self-paced, learning systems within community college courses in order to accommodate the differing learning abilities of non-traditional students. To assess student preferences for such instruction as opposed to traditional, lecture/discussion teaching, an…

A study investigated the role that writing plays in eleventh grade students' understanding of literary texts. Classroom observations, collected student writing, interviews with the teacher, and interviews with six case study students--two from each of three classes--provided a portrait of teaching methods, writing tasks, and student responses to…

The purpose of this article was to clarify the seemingly contrary philosophies of learner centered and teacher centered teaching approaches. First, the benefits of both approaches are described. Examples of ways in which teacher centered classes using thoughtful questioning techniques or focused lectures enhance learning are presented. The…