Retrospective reports gathered from developmental education students as part of a learning assessment revealed the use of several strategies for writing a summary based on a text. Participants were selected for the study based on the richness and variety of their verbal descriptions of task performance in structured, individualized interviews.…

When it comes to academic work, students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often have the required knowledge but struggle to get their thoughts down in writing. This is a practical guide to teaching and improving writing skills in students with ASD to meet academic writing standards and prepare for the increased expectations of higher education.…

Reviews research and concludes that many studies support the use of various types of writing to help students develop their reading skills. (AEA)

Describes the Reading/Writing Task, a procedure used to assess what students recall and comprehend from their reading but that also guides them to recall, summarize, and react to what they have read. Discusses the activities involved in the task and the evaluation procedure, and outlines the Reading/Writing Task scoring framework. (TJQ)

An understanding of an author's structure of ideas assists readers in comprehending a text. Three kinds of writing activities relate to a reading comprehension subskill. (1) sequencing--the logical presentation of events, times, places, ideas or steps in a procedure to accomplish a task or to comprehend an event--for which a teaching progression…

A program of written composition based on reading comprehension can help students gain greater in-depth understanding of reading materials. Once the reading comprehension skill has been clearly defined for the class, the writing activity can provide clarification by allowing for analysis of the definition through written manipulation of language.…

To describe a cross-curriculum writing model designed for a middle school, this paper provides a condensed script of what the designer of the program said and did during its first year to steer the program in a productive direction. The paper is written in the form of exerpts from relevant conversations. The first conversation relates how the idea…

This paper shows how to integrate reading comprehension instruction and writing instruction through the use of sentence combining--the act of combining several short sentences that have been derived by transformational analysis from longer ones. Suggestions are offered to guide teachers through the necessary steps for designing appropriate…

Outlines the steps a college composition instructor can take to help students connect the idea relationships in a reading selection or in a writing assignment. The steps are based on a conceptual strategy known as semantic mapping or semantic networking. (SRT)

On the basis of a National Humanities project proposed by the English department of a St. Louis, Missouri high school, many different approaches to drawing students into writing about and understanding literature were developed. One of three such techniques is a sequence of writing-reading-writing that offers the possibility of both enhancing the…

Sentence combining activities can be used throughout the English curriculum. The entire composing process can be developed with sentence combining activities based on student rough drafts of book reports, analysis and imitation of sentences written by professional writers, the organization of sentences in whole paragraphs or essays, and "oral…

Written by teachers for teachers of elementary school students, the 20 articles in this collection are designed to provide insights into the way children learn to write and to encourage teachers to examine their own theories and perceptions of writing and writing instruction. The articles are grouped in five sections. In the first section, six…

Reading and writing are both creative acts of communication that use written language as a vehicle for meaning. A strong theoretical case for teaching the two processes concurrently can be built by examining points of contact between reading and writing. One such point is context concerns. The Communication Triangle model (author/audience/…

An experimental program was undertaken to determine the effects of attitude and reading achievement on writing, to ascertain if intervention could improve writing achievement and attitude, and to predict success in the program on the basis of an attitude inventory that measured need for structure and tolerance of ambiguity. Subjects were 15 boys…

Describes the Directed Reading-Writing Activity (DRWA) as a framework that helps high school students write about the information they acquire through reading. Discusses how the DRWA's three steps--preparation, involvement, and reaction--extends the thought processes associated with reading comprehension into effective writing. (AEW)