This paper reviews research on outcomes of writing programmes for students in Years 3 to 13 in England, or grades 2 to 12 in the US. Studies had to meet rigorous standards of research including use of randomised or well-matched control groups, measures independent of the programme developers, researchers, and teachers, and adequate sample size and…

This paper presents a special issue on writing around the globe. Researchers from across the world describe writing practices in their country using a wide variety of methodology. The papers show that while there are many similarities in writing instruction from one country to the next, there are also many differences. As a result, the authors…

This paper explores primary school children's ability to engage with "the power of the text" by tackling persuasive writing in the form of an advertisement. It is eclectically framed within genre theory and rhetorical studies and makes use of linguistic tools and concepts. The paper argues that writing research has not built upon earlier…

Suggests an approach for expanding and integrating research to produce a history of technical writing. Defines problems that reside in writing such a history, suggests research premises and questions, and then applies these questions to technical writing as it existed in the English Renaissance, 1475-1640. (SR)

One of the ways in which tutors can help students improve their academic writing is to give them positive and constructive feedback on their work. D. Hounsell, however, suggests that written comments may fail to connect because tutors' and students' perceptions of marking criteria can be very different. This paper reports on two research studies,…

This paper outlines research which examined the relationship between drama and writing, detailing the method of enquiry, theoretical foundations and emergent findings. The study sought to understand the nature of the support that drama offers children as writers and to identify features of writing which regularly surfaced in drama-related writing.…

Examines the differences between writing research conducted in England and that conducted in Canada and North America. Discusses how educators and researchers have used their observations to derive a pedagogy and have done so much too rapidly. (HTH)

Noting that composition studies in the United States has devoted little attention to cross-national perspectives on student writing and its roles in wider cultural contexts, this book presents research studies from six nations (China, England, France, Germany, Kenya, and South Africa) on academic writing development in the dominant language of…

Describes a study of a writing exchange between a classroom of teenagers (mostly African American, mostly male) in the United States and another classroom of students in England. Notes that even reluctant writers produced responses in a variety of styles. (SR)

The key ideas developed by the Writing across the Curriculum Project begun at the University of London in 1965 center on the ways in which discourse is acquired by children in a psycholinguistic sense. Among those ideas are (1) knowledge is socially determined through the interweaving of individual consciousnesses, each of which is busy construing…

A study compared the teaching of composition in secondary British and American schools in the areas of English, social studies, and science. Surveys were returned by 223 teachers in the southeastern Alabama area (out of 310 surveys sent) and by 48 teachers in Suffolk County, England (out of 87 surveys requested). Low response from teachers in…

The study described in this book was designed to create an overall picture of the type of student found at a school for educationally substandard army recruits in England, to establish the causes of the student's educational backwardness and relate these to linguistic performance, and to compare the effectiveness of the approaches and methods used…

Identifies a set of linguistic/rhetorical measures which were developed to analyze cross-cultural differences in student argumentative/persuasive writing at the same age level. Compares the writing achievement of students from America, England, and New Zealand to test these measures, and contrasts these results with those produced by holistic…

Ten six- and seven-year-old British children were chosen for case study investigation of the importance of children's interactions with each other and with their teacher in launching writing through sustained speech. The school was identified by educational experts as one of the "progressive" or "informal" variety, where…

A study investigated the range of methods and approaches used by teachers in Year 2 in teaching reading and writing, and the assumptions underlying these approaches. Headteachers of 122 nationally representative maintained schools in England and Wales completed a brief questionnaire giving mostly statistical information about their school. A…