The double-entry journal requires students to write affective response statements to readings, and to compare such entries with classmates. After discussions with peers and critical analysis of the literature, students write a second journal entry synthesizing insights gained from discussion, analysis, readings, and writings. The journal (1)…

Emphasizing the generic nature of reading behavior and providing a forum to explore this behavior, this book contains the following papers: (1) "Literacy Begins at Home" (Nancy Larrick); (2) "Literacy--Signs for Our Times" (Lil Thompson); (3) "Diversity and Its Discontents" (Arturo Madrid); (4) "May We Always Hear the Bell: The Teaching of…

This paper reconsiders the nature of literature as a school subject. Musing on three anomalies that occur when language arts teachers consider their professions about school literature and what occurs in literature classrooms: (1) the anomaly of the text and the textbook; (2) the anomaly of the idolatry of naive readers whose heads have been…

Intended for teachers, this workbook uses 20 well-known children's books as models to teach expository and narrative writing skills. The workbook teaches students about brainstorming, focus, organization, elaboration, and writing conventions with readily-available quality children's literature, such as "When I Was Young in the…

Based on the premise that teachers are the chief condition in the literate classroom, and that one of the most important things children do is to observe the way adults think and learn, this book presents five essays suggesting methods of inviting children into the adult world of reading and writing. After a foreword by Donald Graves and an…

This ERIC/RCS Special Collection contains seven ERIC Digests (brief syntheses of the research on a specific topic in contemporary education) and eight FAST Bibs (Focused Access to Selected Topics--annotated bibliographies with selected entries from the ERIC database), providing up-to-date information in an accessible format. The collection focuses…

Reflects on how the author's third-grade students, experienced in literary conversation from their reading workshop, transferred the practice of literary conversation to their writing workshop. (SR)

Reader-writer conferencing was examined as an alternative or complement to the direct assessment of writing. Criteria guiding development of a framework for analysis of reader-writer conferencing were summarized as: (1) achievability; (2) transfer to other domains of writing; (3) importance of the outcomes; (4) inter-scorer agreement; and (5)…

Taking a consistent student- and response-centered approach to literature-based teaching in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms, this book is designed for use as a main text in undergraduate and graduate language arts methods courses. The book is firmly grounded in current social constructivist learning theory combined with a…

The discussions of 30 participants in a seminar on the present (mid-1980s) state of research in the English language arts are included in this document. Topics of discussions were as follows: (1) interrelating the processes of reading and writing; (2) texts with different structures and different content: implications for teaching comprehension…

This practicum was designed to improve the congruency of resources, activities, and assessment strategies in intermediate-level language arts programs with a holistic process-oriented perspective on literacy development. Taking place in a large public elementary school in Vancouver, Canada, the practicum's goals were: (1) to implement…