There is considerable concern that the majority of adolescents do not develop the competence in writing they need to be successful in school, the workplace, or their personal lives. A common explanation for why youngsters do not write well is that schools do not do a good job of teaching this complex skill. In an effort to identify effective…

The history of instructional material development for English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) instruction in the United States is chronicled through five different instructional approaches: the audiolingual approach (late 1940s to early 1960s); transformational grammar (early 1960s to the present); Total Physical Response (late 1970s to the present);…

Combining concepts of cognitive theory with those of rhetoric and linguistics can help writing teachers understand the kinds of activities that will enable basic writers to produce syntactic constructions appropriate for the content they have generated. A review of research studies of sentence combining, syntactic constructions, grammatical…

A variety of process-oriented writing instruction strategies are presented in this focused journal issue. Article titles and authors are as follows: (1) "Central Reference to the Rescue" (Rod Kessler); (2)"Brainstorming: A Heuristic that Works" (Frank C. Cronin); (3) "Brainstorming: A Valuable Supplemental Technique for…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 15 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: personal expressiveness in creative writing programs; generative rhetoric and writing performance; the effects of sentence combining exercises on syntactic…