Deconstruction for reconstruction is a classroom teaching technique designed to help students improve writing skills. The objective is to write natural expanded sentences that fit in a cohesive paragraph. The technique evolved from observation of many intermediate and upper-intermediate students of English as a Second Language for whom writing…

A study examined the interaction strategies of one teacher for promoting student writing in the dialogue journals of 12 limited-English-proficient sixth grade students and the effect of these strategies on the length and complexity of the students' writing. The teacher strategies identified include requests for a reply and personal contributions…

A middle school teacher of writing to learners of English as a Second Language describes two techniques used to improve student participation and guide the writing process. The first is to select a writing topic to which all students can relate. In this case, the teacher asked students, in a class discussion, to give their own definitions of…

A middle school teacher describes the process by which she discovered a collaborative approach to teaching writing to a class including English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students. To create a meaningful writing experience, she had students prepare a personal narrative, starting by having the class generate endings to the sentence beginning "I'll…