Expository writing (EW) is crucial for the literacy development of students with intellectual disabilities (ID) in inclusive classrooms. Students with ID, however, struggle with EW due to problems with generating, organizing, and producing text. Similarly, teachers of students with ID face challenges with employing the appropriate instructional…

Students with emotional or behavioral disorders (EBD) perform academically below their peers. One area of particular challenge is written expression. Using a multiple-probe design across participants, this study evaluated the effects of GO 4 IT . . . NOW! strategy instruction on the writing skills of three students with EBD, ages 11-14. The…

Writing is a difficult task for most students. Only 27% of all students in America can write proficiently at or above grade level (U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, 2012). With the recent adoption of rigorous standards (i.e., Common Core State Standards, Next Generation Science Standards), secondary students are…

Writing is a very important skill that should be mastered properly by university students, especially pre-service language teachers (e.g. EFL student teachers). In order to present their ideas efficiently in the context of their academic study, they have to be trained well on how to write meaningful pieces (e.g. essays, academic reports,…

It has been more than thirty years since Richard Braddock published the notable article in which he examined the manner that professional writers utilize topic sentences. He found in his corpus that expository paragraphs seldom began with topic sentences. Consequently, Braddock (1974) admonished teachers to stop instructing their students that…

Describes several types of "paragraph frames" to help teach beginning writing in the content areas. Notes that these frames, employing a modified cloze procedure, help bridge the gap between narrative and expository reading and writing. Provides several student writing samples. (MM)

In asserting that cohesion both exists in a superordinate relationship to unity and emphasis and must be considered a part of the surface structure of written language as well as the deep structure, this text provides a commentary on the paragraph as the basic unit of written language and an analysis of the structure underlying paragraph…

Offers a four-step procedure that can be used to help upper elementary school students learn to write a well-structured expository paragraph. Suggests that the writing experience is a bridge to understanding more difficult text structure. (FL)

Designed to help teachers find an effective approach in teaching expository writing, this guide divides expository writing into five main types: definition/classification, comparison/contrast, thesis/proof, problem/solution, and inference (drawing conclusions). Five different starter techniques are presented with each of the five main types of…

Superordinates in Halliday and Hasan's analysis of cohesion are lexical items which refer to preceding terms, ideas, or actions, or to whole stretches of discourse, by naming a more inclusive category or class within which the antecedent is included. In written texts the interrelationships between superordinates and more specific terms, or…

To show the shortcomings of concentrating on the teaching of sentences and paragraphs in basic writing courses, this paper points out problems encountered by one teacher who attempted to use that approach. The paper describes how the teacher discovered that teaching the rules and concepts of grammar and writing stifles students' creativity,…

The article describes a secondary-level curriculum for written expression based on a linguistic model. Directed toward learning disabled adolescents, the method teaches sentence and paragraph construction based on verbal and written models presented by the teacher. Writing good sentences, paragraphs, and essays is presented as a logical extension…

An approach to teaching expository writing in English as a Second Language (ESL) to native speakers of Chinese is offered. It is based on a comparison and classification of rhetorical patterns in the two languages. Chinese rhetoric contains a wide variety of methods of presentation, including both direct and indirect, or metaphoric, forms. It is…

This handbook is one of a set of six which provide a systematic means to help students in grades 4 through 8 learn the process of writing while building specific writing skills. The handbook focuses on paragraph writing, and offers 25 reproducible lessons, in a variety of formats, to help students improve their use of descriptive, narrative,…

Because junior high school literature anthologies contain few expository offerings and English texts seldom involve students in critical reading as background for writing, it is up to the teacher to fill the gap. One approach for providing students with critical reading practice is the cloze procedure, which (1) encourages close reading and…