Teaching scientific writing in biology classes is challenging for both students and instructors. This article offers and reviews several useful "toolkit" items that improve student writing. These include sentence and paper-length templates, funnelling and compartmentalisation, and preparing compendiums of corrections. In addition,…

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…

Explains how to use various periodicals to demonstrate to composition students that writing style is both accessible and controllable. (AEA)

Describes an assignment in which students are taught to develop poetry using the ideas and words found in newspaper or magazine stories. Includes model poems. (HTH)

Argues that teachers of young children need to recognize and take advantage of suitable opportunities to model their writing skills. Offers examples of possible activities. (FL)

One of the author's main goals as a teacher is to impart the skills necessary for students to be successful in science, and that means teaching them how to think and write like scientists. At times, though, it seemed as though the author had exhausted all avenues without ever reaching this goal. At the beginning of each year, she starts her…

Describes a method for teaching writing in which a series of passages are rewritten by the student, altered by progressively difficult transformations and manipulations, as an alternative to grammar instruction. (HTH)

Presents a model of written language that can guide the instruction of hearing-impaired students, and strategies and techniques for improving writing skills, using research and theory from such areas as fluency, syntax, vocabulary, content, conventions, student motivation, guided practice, student interaction, and selective feedback. (CB) (Adjunct…

The writing process depends heavily on linguistic, psycho-perceptual, and psycho-motor abilities. If a student has a significant weakness in one of these major trait clusters, then thinking will suffer and he or she may experience great difficulty in writing. The process of writing can be broken down into four main phases, which can be labeled…

Noting that the writer's journal is both a memory bank for observations and a nonthreatening means of exploring language, this guide offers individual classroom strategies for making the journal a valuable writing instruction tool. Following an introduction, the guide is divided into sections as follows: (1) philosophy of journals in the…

Presents exercises combining sentence generation from prescribed conjunctions with analysis of literary characters. (MM)

Surveys the history of composition instruction in America and concludes that imitation exercises may still be valuable to modern students. (JL)

A technique sometimes known as patterned prose or case book exposition is an effective way to improve student writing while also holding their interest. It may also help solve a problem pointed to by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP): students' inability to think about what they read. The technique is simple. The teacher…

Presents a comprehensive theory-based model that encompasses all writing assignments across all disciplines; adapts Jakobson's communication model to written communication. (HTH)

Advocates modeling as an appropriate approach to teaching composition, provided teachers select models carefully and present them as paradigms of dynamic processes and as hints leading to avenues of discovery. Uses N. Scott Momaday's "The Way to Rainy Mountain" to illustrate how such a model can be used to assist student invention. (RBW)