Explores fifth graders' audience awareness when they compose and revise an original text for two audiences (a good third grade reader and an experienced adult reader) in a realistic transactional writing task. Finds that they successfully revised texts to address expectations of both audiences but were more successful for the third grade readers.…

In writing, as in conversation, there are implicit boundaries which separate various modes of communication, and these boundaries cause exclusion, discomfort, and misunderstanding. The existence of these boundaries results in a number of issues, such as the categorization of texts, the differences between writing for English classes and writing in…

Discusses how students of both sexes in a third-grade class used popular culture to scaffold their stories--they (1) aimed at audience reaction, often using argument and shock; (2) incorporated their favorite writers and curricular topics into their pieces; and (3) by year's end, merged the talents of both genders into a higher form of literacy.…

Examines how personal versus formal writing tasks affect students' response to and comprehension of literary text. Finds that personal writing tasks enabled students to produce qualitatively more effective responses that tended to be more fluent and constructed with a wider range of response statements. (RS)

A study examined a number of concepts drawn from recent research on the social contexts of writing as it is conducted in academic and professional communities to determine how novice writers learn the rhetorical and linguistic conventions that constitute specialized, disciplinary literacy. These concepts were applied to a close inspection of three…

This study was conducted to determine some of the effects of dyadic writing interactions on the writing of sixth graders, and specifically, to describe the effects of corresponding with pen pals who were students in a language arts methods course during their professional teacher education year. Twenty-seven sixth-grade students attended a school…

One of the tasks for the British National Curriculum Council has been to identify steps toward proficiency in the English language and, on that basis, issue descriptions of appropriate progress for students at each level and stage. There is a danger that teachers may view these steps as a linear sequence of accomplishments, each to be achieved in…