Understanding writing assignments is critical to college students' success as they transition from high school to postsecondary environments, but students with writing difficulties struggle to extrapolate required tasks from assignments presented in narrative form. The researcher examined the ability of students to identify assignment tasks when…

English teachers have a unique opportunity to expand and develop the way their students think. Too often, students are comfortable in thinking about reading and writing processes in a concrete or linear way. They are used to "right" or "wrong" answers in their other studies and look for the same in their English assignments. While teachers often…

Designed to encourage students to discover that grammar merely represents the patterns that exist in language, this book presents lessons on 19 grammar points: nouns; pronouns; verbs; subjects; capitalization; end punctuation; commas; sentence fragments; run-on sentences; contractions; possessives; quotation marks; adjectives; adverbs;…

Offers seven effective learning activities for the first day of class. (MS)

Describes a writing exercise in which students are asked to write questions to be submitted to a hypothetical computer. Suggestions for subsequent activities are provided. (TO)

Describes efforts and results of teaching students to write free verse by recasting old poems, e.g., taking a poem heavy with rhyme, meter, and inversions and modernizing it freely using some of the techniques of free verse. (HOD)

Describes rewriting examples of good writing into "ordinary" writing, to identify what elements of style made the original version so effective. (HTH)

Suggests that student's expression in composition will improve by daily journal writing. (HOD)

This dissertation presents an approach to composition teaching based upon language play. The study is aimed especially at an audience of composition teachers; but, because of its emphasis on literature as a model for all language play, the study contains much material which should be of interest to teachers of literature and those generally…

Just as spoken language is intended to be heard by an audience, written language aims to be read by an audience. In helping kids learn to write, teachers have ignored this crucial fact. The article discusses how a high school English teacher on the Navajo Indian Reservation got the students to do poetry and other creative writing. (Author/NQ)

Describes a technique used in an English composition course to encourage student experimentation with different language choices. The students are given a Chinese poem, along with a romanized pronunciation and dictionary translation of each character. They are then instructed to write a few sentences in English conveying the poem's message. (SED)

Suggests using poetry's short short forms for a methodical and rapid series of writing assignments that emphasize both careful writing at the sentence level and overall planning and respect for form. (HTH)