Describes how, in a second-/third-grade classroom, and in the context of writing workshop, another kind of community developed--an informal but long-lasting "writing club" with eight core members who worked collaboratively and developed a story topic that became the dominant story topic pattern throughout the remainder of the school year. (SR)

The University of North Dakota possesses an archive containing the schoolwork, writings, and artworks of 32 children. In a study, all of the fiction and poetry of three of the children were gathered, as were teachers' descriptive records and examples of the children's drawings. It can be concluded from a study of the randomly selected children…

A study explored literacy myths of the academic culture as expressed by college writing students, examining shared literacy myths about the acquisition and uses of literacy, how beliefs influence literacy acquisition, and how cultural roles determine literacy experiences. Students were asked to write autobiographical accounts of their literacy…

Intended to provide teachers of poetry with both inspiration and teaching advice, this paper explains how one teacher developed a method for teaching poetry successfully in high school. The first part of the paper consists of an autobiographical fragment describing how the teacher used free time to begin seriously writing poetry, as well as how…

A project examined the ways in which college freshmen constructed a gendered cultural identity in their narratives of events during their acquisition of literacy, and the ways in which teachers constructed the gendered, literate identity of their student authors. Three female teacher-readers were asked to: (1) evaluate the quality of each of 13…

A case study explored two African Americans' perceptions of Black English (BE) in their writing of academic prose and the effect these perceptions may have on their own metalinguistic awareness. Subjects, two African American male undergraduates enrolled at Ohio State University who had difficulty with grammar or used BE in their writings, were…

This study was conducted to determine some of the effects of dyadic writing interactions on the writing of sixth graders, and specifically, to describe the effects of corresponding with pen pals who were students in a language arts methods course during their professional teacher education year. Twenty-seven sixth-grade students attended a school…

Describes a study on college level remediation, examining how students classified as remedial are cognitively and socially defined. Analyzes a student's writing sample in the context of her past school experiences, future goals, and attitudes towards literacy. (MM)

Reports on a study of stories written by eighth graders in three very different schools, stories carrying powerful messages about how girls understand their place in the world. Finds that, in one set of stories, females control their lives only as long as they are "good," and in the other set, autonomous female protagonists fail (often for no…

By the 1980s, the whole language philosophy (Goodman, 1986), based on the idea that reading and writing should be done for authentic purposes, gained credibility. As the movement gained momentum, more teachers began to adopt the student-centered writing workshop as a way of teaching writing. A study of a class of 27 culturally diverse third…

Four studies by the Cognitive Strategy Instruction in Writing project at the Institute for Research on Teaching, Michigan State University, examined the acquisition of expository writing skills in fifth and sixth grade students. The first study examined the effects of teaching sixth grade students about comparison/contrast text structure. Results…

A study investigated one way in which teachers can focus on more than children's products and writing processes by examining their social processes as well, specifically the health of the classroom communities and the individual children's comfort within those communities. Under the supervision of the same teacher, "journal time" in…

A study examined the effects of a "pen pal" letter writing exchange on undergraduate college students and second grade children. Subjects, 23 second graders, completed a letter writing attitude survey, and then (after receiving an explanation of what a pen pal is) exchanged letters with the undergraduates over a l5-week period. Results…

Focusing on the integration of early reading and writing skills, a study examined the instructional use of daily dialogue journals over a 5-month period in a class of 10 third-grade Native American students living on an Indian reservation in northern Michigan. Students were required to make an entry of at least three lines every day, all writing…

Based on the idea that journal writing can help students discover gaps in their knowledge and explore relationships by allowing them to reflect on what they have learned, a study examined the usefulness of expressive journal writing in a first grade mathematics program. Subjects, members of a first grade classroom involved in a…