The teaching of writing in secondary English subjects in Australia, as in other countries including England and the United States, has become increasingly formulaic. Pedagogies including direct instruction, modelling, scaffolding, and genre-based approaches involve the implementation of formulas for writing sentences, paragraphs, and entire…

Teachers of writing have two options available to them when it comes to teaching paragraphing. There are, broadly speaking, either "laissez faire" approaches, or tightly prescriptivist ones. While the latter approaches have, at times, been challenged, they are entrenched in textbooks and testing rubrics, and are highly influential in…

The author, who teaches the English Methods class in the credential program, knew from entries in students' Writer's Reader's Notebooks (Rief) that they were struggling with the articles assigned about a five-paragraph essay. Following a discussion of form-first instruction and CCSS assessments, this article provides concrete suggestions for…

The use of writing models with nonnative English speakers has received a certain amount of criticism--especially from teachers whose students copy models in their entirety or follow them too closely. The misuse of models has brought some teachers to the point where they believe that the best kind of pedagogy is to abandon writing models…

Structured Literacy (SL) approaches are often recommended for students with dyslexia and other poor decoders (e.g., International Dyslexia Association, 2017). Examples of SL approaches include the Wilson Reading System (Wilson, 1988), Orton-Gillingham (Gillingham & Stillman, 2014), the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program (Lindamood &…

Writing is a very important skill that should be mastered properly by university students, especially pre-service language teachers (e.g. EFL student teachers). In order to present their ideas efficiently in the context of their academic study, they have to be trained well on how to write meaningful pieces (e.g. essays, academic reports,…

Three articles by practicing instructors suggest techniques for improving developmental student success. Judith Maisey describes values clarification strategies designed to help students better understand their world views. Beverly Stratton discusses the use of graphics in teaching paragraph organization. Judy Lambert outlines writing topics…

Presents a strategy for teaching paragraph cohesion based on the "given-new contract" theory of information transfer that explains why and how to construct unified and cohesive paragraphs. (PD)

An experiment with students in a first year college German course was carried out to study the value of free writing assignments and to discover a feasible and helpful correction method. Research in English composition methodology indicates that extensive teacher's corrective marks have a detrimental effect on a student's progress. Yet, foreign…

Applicable to kindergarten through grade 12, the individualized Language Arts composition program is based upon actual student experiences. Once student writing samples have been plotted on a diagnostic grid, the program's manual provides teachers with specific methods for meeting students' needs. Uniting cognitive, affective, and creative…

Foreign students in American colleges and universities experience difficulty with various aspects of English composition, especially grammar, mechanics, syntax, sentence and paragraph structure, and report writing. One way to deal with the situation is to set up a composition course in ESL in which the specific problems of non-native speakers are…

An integrated approach to teaching English composition to undergraduate students in Indian universities is proposed. The integration in approach is realized in terms of an onward progression from the first to the third year of the degree course. The idea of an integrated approach (viewing the sentence and the paragraph in an integrated manner) can…

The program grew out of the desire of monolingual students, native bilingual students, and instructors for a class to meet the specific needs of Spanish-speaking students of Spanish. The objectives are: (1) to improve the self image of the students, (2) to increase access to the Spanish-speaking community of the world, (3) to use native bilingual…