This research conducted diagnostic assessment of problems in first-year undergraduates' English academic papers and tracked potential sources of the problems to the writing process and strategy use. Data collected include 339 term papers and interviews with 17 students. The samples were manually error tagged and marked against a detailed…

To date there have been no systematic studies examining the ways in which teachers in England focus and adapt their teaching of writing. The current study addresses this gap by investigating the nature and frequency of teachers' approaches to the teaching of writing in a sample of English primary schools, using the "simple view of…

This article outlines a rational for responsive, differentiated writing instruction that targets students' identified needs with respect to various dimensions of the writing process. Discussed is a cycle that requires ongoing assessment, instructional decision-making, responsive, differentiated instruction, guided practice, and assessment.…

Today, when the author reads articles or hears discussions about teaching grammar, she finds interesting dichotomies in perspectives. Some people see language issues as right or wrong: That's it. No flexibility. This perspective is evident when people look at issues of language in stark contrasts instead of in relation to context. Another…

Students with writing difficulties and learning disabilities struggle with many aspects of the writing process, including use of sentence-level skills. This literature review summarizes results from 19 published articles that used single-case or group-experimental and quasi-experimental designs to investigate effects of intervention on the…

Using straightforward, easy-to-understand language, this handbook of English provides hundreds of examples to illustrate in specific detail what is proper in all areas of English grammar, style, and writing. The handbook provides learning exercises at the end of every chapter for a thorough review of the concepts covered in the chapter. The first…

A crucial concept in Francis Christensen's principles of writing involves the "addition," which may be construed as any grammatical unit that is not a main clause. Obviously the effect of rhetorical writing derives mainly from the number of additions as well as from their placement and function within the single sentence. By means of…

One of six related documents, making up a U.S. Air Force correspondence course, this publication deals with effective writing and emphasizes the sentence as the basic unit of written communication. Part one focuses on internal sentence punctuation and covers the use of the comma, semicolon, colon, period, capital, abbreviations, and numbers. Part…

Describes a sequence of four studies that explored how people composed sentences while writing expository essays. Among the findings were that the sentence composition process was often guided by a writing plan, and the most frequent changes accomplished by revision of parts were word choice, aspect of meaning, and grammatical structure. (HOD)

Designed for students who have grammatical problems, the syntactic approach presented in this paper helps explain the process of revision, and should be used only after a student has written a draft. The paper suggests that the students' hypothetical objective can be to understand how every word in any sentence is syntactically connected to the…

Describes three semantic theories for teaching the writing process (case grammars, the "given-new" contract, and cohesion), with their implications for helping students communicate more effectively with their audiences. (RL)

Basic writers often experience difficulties when trying to articulate ideas in writing that are more specific, systematic, and fully developed than their speech. The writers must learn how to put their thinking into the appropriate forms and expressions necessary to address an academic audience. Noting that the natural working of the human mind…

Based on English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students' documented preference for error correction and the need for word usage and sentence grammar to become automatic, this article describes the rationale and procedures for using reformulation as composition feedback. The procedures are aimed at improving sentence level grammar. Discusses survey…

Reviews over 50 textbooks grouped into three categories: (1) workbooks; (2) sentence style books, most of which use sentence combining as the fundamental type of exercise; and (3) copy books, which are used by directly copying passages with signals for particular changes. (EL)