Gateway courses in English challenge students to strengthen skills in critical thinking, reading, grammar, and writing structure and strategies -- skills that also help build competency in comprehension and composition. They can also prove to be a particular challenge to many community college students. This case study examines the efforts at…

Describes a writing program that uses lay readers from the community to help correct student writing assignments and instruct in writing skills. (IRT)

Describes the Coastal Georgia Writing Project, a part of the National Writing Project. Argues that more two-year college English teachers should join the National Writing Project network. (HB)

When traditional methods of teaching composition--such as those based on great books or emulation of models--failed, the author found that television was useful for teaching necessary skills. His University of Michigan freshman composition course, based strictly on television programs, is discussed. (JMD)

The first section of this paper discusses the sentence combining approach to teaching writing and includes illustrations of sentence combining problems. The second section describes a program in which the sentence combining approach was used with low ability seventh graders in an inner-city junior high school. Among the benefits of the program…

This paper describes a developmental writing course at Purdue University. The author argues that the basics of such a course as far as the student is concerned are motivation and a desire to learn writing, communication, careful diagnosis, organized plan for student mastery, provision for transferral, and reward. Helping students develop a desire…

Eastern Michigan University's opportunity program for underprepared students, called the Promote Academic Survival and Success (PASS) program, is described. The improvement of the students' reading and writing skills was emphasized. This was seen as the most direct way for the students' to achieve academic competence and self-integration. (MLW)

Reviews the sequential steps followed in teaching basic composition at the University of Alabama. Discusses traditional teaching techniques, word choice, and types of writing, and describes alternative teaching techniques. (DR)

As a result of an extensive examination of its freshman composition program, the English department at the University of Nebraska at Omaha created an individualized, self-paced program in writing. This paper describes the areas of concern identified during the assessment of the traditional writing program, discusses the principles upon which the…

This report of the writing project at P.K. Yonge Laboratory School, University of Florida, examines the effectiveness of a systematic approach to teaching high school composition. The approach, which focuses on the skills that enable students to write clearly, correctly, and purposefully, includes sequential instructional units, considerable…

To enable junior high school students to relate the processes of reading, writing, and thinking through deliberate instruction and extensive classroom practice, a skills extension project was devised to develop original materials linked to the content areas of English and social studies. Another phase of the project provided for inservice training…

The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund Intensive Journalistic Writing Institute, a 2-week summer workshop for Ohio high school teachers of journalism conducted in June 1991, demonstrated that the team of journalistic writing techniques and current composition pedagogy is unbeatable in fostering critical reading and writing skills. The institute focused on…

Individualization in freshman composition is necessitated not only by the individual differences of students but also by their varying writing competencies. (Editor)

Describes how a North Carolina school system's integrated English/Social Studies pilot program helped ninth grade students develop more awareness of their local, state, and national community. Notes that the program features research, writing, and literary analysis, as well as a planned program for the "common good." (PRA)