With practical applications for parents and teachers, this book uses diary entries, tape recordings, and videotapes made by the child's mother from a researcher's perspective to chronicle a child's reading and writing development from birth to age three. The introduction provides an overview of how children learn to talk, read, and write;…

Provides a model of the rhetorical problem, based on the study of writing as a problem-solving cognitive process; describes three major differences between good and poor writers revealed by a protocol analysis study. (DD)

School- and university-based writing tasks make demands on cognitive processing and socio-cultural knowledge that vary with the discipline in which the writing is situated. The variation in socio-cognitive demands makes the use of self-accessed, computer-mediated writing instruction more promising than conventional, teacher-fronted instruction. To…

Twenty countries are participating in the IEA International Study of Written Composition, for which this is a background report. school-based writing in particular, this report discusses the functions of writing from the point of view of culture, cognition, and child development. It also presents a usable model for constructing and evaluating…

Research indicates that writing can be an important vehicle for integrating all the learning that occurs in a foreign language. However, a number of factors have conspired to displace foreign language writing as a critical skill: the push for oral proficiency, departmental fragmentation, larger class sizes, and heavier faculty loads. Second…

Working from both literary and composition theory, this book argues that American composition theory and pedagogy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is founded on the Platonic view that invention is a solitary act in which the individual, drawing upon innate knowledge and mental structures, searches for the truth, using introspective self…

The nature of children's communication processes of listening, speaking, reading, and drawing/writing that occur during story time is explored in this paper, which describes story time as a literacy event. The framework that children develop during story-time can serve as a vehicle for language arts instruction. In helping children cultivate…

A study focused on how the writer's knowledge of the language and use of a prewriting strategy for planning ideas affect the quality and efficiency of the writing. Three hypotheses were developed about how knowledge and strategy might influence writing performance: (1) independence (predicts that knowledge and strategy will independently improve…

Three universes of discourse are at work when writers create or use a metaphor: the analogical or metaphorical universe from which they borrow words, things, and relationships (sometimes called the "vehicle"); the contextual universe in which the analogy is being used (sometimes called the "topic"); and the metauniverse, or the comprehensive…

The relationship between reading and writing is explored in this book. Titles of the book's essays and their authors are as follows: (1) "What Is the Value of Connecting Reading and Writing?" by Robert J. Tierney and Margie Leys; (2) "Reflective Thought: The Connection between Reading and Writing" by June Cannell Birnbaum; (3)…

Recent brain research demonstrates that the left hemisphere of the brain processes information in a linear, organized way. The right hemisphere processes the same information as a whole, with a focus on nonverbal, spatial components. Current educational practice is inordinately skewed to develop only the left hemisphere of the brain. Data from…

In Chapter Three, Marilyn Gillespie provides a summary of the research on writing instruction that has taken place over the last three decades. In her survey of writing research, she describes models of the writing process such as that developed by Flower and Hayes, who viewed writing as three cognitive writing processes: planning, text generation…

Investigates both the reading and writing behaviors of eight good readers and writers in order to identify shared cognitive-linguistic patterns that might mark both processes, developmental differences between the age groups, and patterns of academic and nonacademic influences on the writing. (HOD)

Presents a study of the acquisition and development of information coordination ability. Examines students' composition of texts comparing two cultural groups after reading either one text describing both or a separate text on each. Concludes that older students used more complex information integration levels, whereas all subjects performed…

To determine students' thought processes as they are writing, over 100 secondary school English students periodically were asked a set of questions immediately after an in-class writing activity, when they were most in touch with their own experiences. Questions were: (1) What things happen to you when you write? (2) What things concerning writing…