Examines the implications of the ACTFL Provisional Proficiency Guidelines for the writing curriculum. Argues that the functions identified in the guidelines should be practices in writing as well as in speech. Discusses error correction techniques and presents examples of writing assignments in Russian that elicit advanced-level functions. (SED)

Discusses ways to teach critical reading skills and writing production to adult learners of Spanish who already have a basic command of the essential grammatical structures, some aural comprehension and reading ability, and adequate capacity to communicate orally. Describes and provides examples of several sample exercises. (SED)

Illustrates using student shared nonacademic experience in preparing group proposals by using an adaptation of the eight-stage process in "The Winning Proposal: How to Write It" by Holtz and Schmidt. (EL)

Presents outlines to help students focus on the qualities of good writing when reading for book reports. The outlines cover mysteries, biographies, and science and science fiction. (HTH)

Describes the methodology and results of a survey of technical writing teachers. Respondents indicated whether their institutions offer a course in lower division technical writing and how they believe such a course should be taught. They also rated the appropriateness of various types of writing exercises. (HTH)

Describes a program of creative writing and describes student objectives and teacher objectives that allow the experience to aid students in producing critical essays. (CRH)

Three methods for teaching writing are proving effective in metropolitan Atlanta schools: (1) using small groups to help students diagnose and review their own papers; (2) assigning brief writing exercises and journals to develop fluency; and (3) deriving lessons in grammar and punctuation from students' own papers to improve mastery of standard…

A study found that college students may have a misplaced confidence in their ability to assess their own fitness and plan their own exercise programs. Results indicate that a lecture-laboratory course does improve the knowledge level of students and seems to improve their confidence in exercise planning. (JN)

Describes design for advanced writing exercises for ESL classes which provides more individualized instruction and acquaints students with English thought patterns which underly the organization of longer units of discourse. Methods isolate one organizational function at a time for intensive practice. (Author/BK)

The author explains how she taught third- and fourth-graders the skills needed to produce a class newspaper: note-taking, layout, news writing, and proofreading. She found that learning research skills and disciplined newswriting improved students' writing in general. (SJL)

The dicto-comp, an exercise consisting of a passage to be read several times by the student and then reproduced, usually taps a student's ability to write dictation and composition. Here the emphasis is on composition rather than auditory memory expansion, with the idea that each dicto-comp has a specific teaching point to convey. (PJM)

Describes three ways to elicit children's poetry about their family histories. Illustrates this teaching technique with sixth graders' poems. (RL)

Describes a technical writing class assignment in which students read reviews published in journals of their professions, emulate the style of those published reviews, and submit a review of their own to a journal. Suggests sources of new books to review and provides an annotated bibliography. (MKM)

Recommends a series of sense exploration exercises to help students develop more adequate descriptive writing. (TJ)