This exploratory study sheds new light on students' perceptions of online feedback types for a complex writing task, summary writing from spoken input in a foreign language (L2), and investigates how these correlate with their actual learning to write. Students tend to favour clear-cut, instructivist rather than constructivist feedback, and guided…

Concerns that sentence combining has become the sole means of instruction in some college composition courses, that students are inadvertently getting the view that writing is essentially a mechanical manipulation of parts strung together, and that writing research has reduced writing to architectural structuralism made up of prewriting, writing,…

Examined preschool children's self-management as they engaged in a literacy task of constructing an "autonomous" text for others to read. Analyzed texts for their holistic quality, and identified metacognitive utterances surrounding the texts, which showed the development of metacognition and its indications for preschoolers. (JPB)

Describes a method for teaching students to connect their ideas causally or logically in their writing by talking about the ideas before beginning to write. (HTH)

A careful use of emphasis by students in their writing can be promoted by some exercises assigned by composition teachers. A drawing exercise can help students learn that changing the length of sentences makes paragraphs more interesting. Using Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's five categories of grief to consider times of depression in students' lives…

The theories of cognitive development put forth by William Perry and by Jean Piaget are helpful in understanding the writing choices students made in responding to an assignment involving writing a persuasive essay. Some students were looking for the "Right Answer" and when they found it, they assumed that everyone would agree with them.…

Reviews theories of cognitive development to show that most basic writers are operating below the true-concept formation stage and have difficulty in "decentering"; suggests writing assignments based on inference-drawing to remedy the situation. (DD)

Writing across the curriculum, or "writing-as-learning" (WAL), represents one of the most successful developments in writing instruction. WAL is an efficient teaching method for achieving educational goals in today's society because it effectively engages students in both the means and the ends of their education. Research has shown that…

Through an original analysis of letters written by 8 students at 4 grade levels (grades 7 through 13), this paper shows the relationship between individual affective and cognitive development and social awareness. Specifically, their relationships are shown by analyzing the writer, the text, and the instructor. Results indicate that seventh grade…

In a composition course, interview assignments have four key virtues: (1) they are interesting in themselves; (2) they ease students into the demands of working with other people's ideas; (3) they offer a rationale for improving rhetorical skills; and (4) they allow students to experience adult, responsible roles in a social context. In addition,…

Because of their egocentricity, many students have a limited sense of other cultures and are caught up in a web of ethnocentric biases without quite knowing how and why these biases exist. A framework, encompassing the theories of J. Moffett and J. Piaget, may be designed to move students through a series of hierarchical writing exercises that…

Writing researchers suggest that children should write stories in order to (1) entertain, (2) foster artistic expression, (3) explore the functions and values of writing, (4) stimulate imagination, (5) clarify thinking, (6) search for identity, and (7) learn to read and write. (HTH)

Explains how a writing course with lyric poetry as its subject matter, when designed according to cognitivist principles, provides an environment in which students can grow as writers and also mature in their ability to respond to literature. (HOD)

An examination of student papers from three universities on the same tasks revealed that expository writing tasks were less demanding cognitively than argumentative writing tasks and that argumentative writing tasks were less demanding than speculative tasks. Another finding was that when students were able to translate a generalized task into…

This booklet is one of a series of teacher-written curriculum publications launched by the Bay Area Writing Project, each focusing on a different aspect of the teaching of composition. The introduction describes an analysis of predication that offers teachers insights into ways of helping students develop an expository thesis and study more…