A research project investigated the development of narrative rhetoric in students in grades 3 through 8 in New York City public schools. Two types of tasks were used, the first requiring students to write a story about the events depicted in a drawing, the second asking them to correct rhetorical problems in prepared narratives. A series of…

Research indicating a strong correlation between reading and writing skills has been used to create effective teaching activities; this paper summarizes research findings and describes teaching activities in three classrooms. (1) As students' reading comprehension and recall have been shown to improve following instruction in summary writing, a…

Most school writing required of students is done in artificial situations that have little resemblance to the writing demands people actually face. For this reason, students often fail to see the value of writing and thus produce writing that does not reflect their true ability to communicate. In a bilingual Los Angeles school serving students…

A variety of sources, including writing samples and videotapes of writing sessions, were examined to determine what speech events underlie the written compositions of students from fourth through twelfth grades. Findings revealed a correlation between different levels of writing competency and four types of speech events: encoding, conversation,…