Writing has been often viewed as a cognitive or social task and instructional practices are influenced by one or the other perspective. However, alternatives may need to be considered that are not as polarized and consider individuals, their environment, their development, their needs, and the role of community (Graham, in press). The purpose of…

This study compared a multiple exemplar approach involving the training of key words and sentence structures to a typical repeated readings procedure for their effects on students' generalized oral reading fluency. The two training approaches were also compared in terms of their relative learning rates (i.e., fluency gain per minute of instruction…

On the ground that reading fluency entails appropriate phrasing or prosody as well as facile word recognition, we investigated the effectiveness of text-based and word-based repeated readings procedures for promoting fluency of reading aloud and comprehension in second-grade children. Repeated readings of text printed with spaces between phrases…

The purpose of this study was to help second grade children expand and elaborate their sentences by using sentence expansion techniques which would provide exposure to word form classes and increase awareness and understanding of syntactic units. Nineteen children in a second grade class for the gifted were asked to write a one-page composition at…

Compositions written by 66 second grade boys and girls in one control and two experimental groups were analyzed to study the effect of 21 instructional sessions in sentence expansion and to determine which of the instructional methods employed was most beneficial to a particular sex group. Lesson plans for the control group were parallel to two…

To see what effects practice--frequent writing without teacher correction--would have on the writing of students in grades one and two in one small elementary school, writing samples were collected from all pupils at each grade level in October and May. Five factors were examined: general impression, length, vocabulary, spelling, and syntactic…

Children from non-English-speaking homes are doubly disadvantaged when learning English in school. They enter school with less prior knowledge of English sounds, word meanings, and sentence structure, and they get little or no reinforcement of their learning outside of the classroom. This article compares the classroom standard practice of…