The five-paragraph essay is highly controversial, and yet it has also been a useful format for composition. In this essay we explain why, despite its limits, students need to go along with the format to make what use and get what advantage of it. We then demonstrate that valuing the philosophical, historical, cultural, and educational backgrounds…

The current standards-based reform movement, which emphasizes teaching academic skills to all students, holds promise for students with disabilities. However, there is concern that this movement's sole focus on academic skills will leave less room for teaching self-determination skills. One possible solution is to identify interventions that can…

This article describes a project which identified the skills and abilities in written literacy of pre-service teachers, as well as their needs in this area. An intervention to address their needs is evaluated and its outcomes assessed, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. Results show that it is possible to improve these…

A mixed methods study was conducted to examine female juvenile delinquents' opinions and reactions on nine language-based literacy activities. Forty-one participants ranging in age from 13 to 18 years responded to a survey consisting of nine multiple-choice items and one open-ended question concerning the usefulness of activities. Quantitative and…

Keeping the content of two paragraphs identical, the author varied their forms using the Functional Sentence Perspectivists' Rule (FSPR) for relating old and new information within the sentences. In subjective readability decisions, a significant number of 272 high school subjects found the rule-governed paragraph more readable than the variant.…

The study investigated the use of repeated writings as a means of increasing written language fluency with 48 learning disabled students in senior high school resource room English classes. Subjects received one of four treatments for 4 days: repeated writing with structural cues, repeated revision with structural cues, writing on a new topic with…

A heuristic procedure can be used to teach organizational skills to students of technical writing. Designed to allow students on their own to explore ways that numbers can be used to give a definite shape to technical information, its central feature is a matrix composed of a series of control numbers (horizontal axis) and organizing concerns…

A challenge facing educators is to find ways to arrest and reverse the cumulative deficit in reading experienced by many students with learning disabilities. In this study, we evaluated the effect of a strategy intervention to increase the reading comprehension of eighth grade students with reading disabilities in intact junior high school classes…

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…

Two samples of college student writing, paragraphs from freshman compositions, are analyzed for presence or absence of two characteristics of literate prose, decontextualization and autonomy. Writing is decontextualized and autonomous when whatever is needed for its comprehension is included in the words of the text, and comprehension is not…

Writing tests are part of the mandated statewide proficiency examination in Nevada. The ninth-grade screening test and the eleventh-grade diploma-certifying test require that a student write a paragraph and a business letter, each on an assigned topic and each at an acceptable level of proficiency. Pilot tests, extended discussion, and statistical…

The Florida Writing Enhancement Program, for all tenth through twelfth grade students, as implemented in the Hillsborough County Public Schools, was evaluated. The program was designed to improve students' writing in the areas of composition, sentence formation, usage, and mechanics. This evaluation was conducted to determine whether the program…