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…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of the simultaneous prompting procedure in teaching paragraph composition to 4, 5th grade students identified with emotional behavioral disorder (EBD) and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The instructor taught students how to construct and proofread a 5-sentence paragraph…

Learning to write in middle school requires the expansion of sentence-level and discourse-level language skills. In this study, we investigated later language development in the writing of a cross-sectional sample of 235 upper elementary and middle school students (grades 4-8) by examining the use of (1) lexico-grammatical forms that support…

The greater emphasis on information books in elementary schools has led to an increased emphasis on informational writing as well. Although some have suggested utilizing mentor texts to engage children in informational writing, there has been little information about the developmental progression of children's ability to compose in this genre.…

Young adolescents should be able to write organized multi-paragraph compositions that develop a central idea and unfold in logical and sequential order, unified through the use of transitional words and phrases. In other words, the compositions should not just consist of a string of related sentences, but represent a dynamic text that has…

This case study measured the effectiveness of a writing strategy designed to enhance the organization and cohesion of paragraphs written by four students with writing difficulties who are currently enrolled in a resource program. The strategy steps were taught through a mnemonic in which steps beginning with each letter of UNITE provided an…

This article introduces a modification of the sentence completion task that acquaints students with various types of informational text structures (e.g., cause-effect, compare-contrast) and challenges their higher order reading and writing skills. When the individual sentences comprising an expository paragraph are intermingled with unrelated…