Engagement in self and peer assessment are authentic ways in which students can develop evaluative and productive knowledge and expertise, necessary prerequisites if they are to become autonomous learners. Teachers in the current study who had articulated similar beliefs in regard to the importance of developing student autonomy and who had…

Educational reform initiatives of the last decade have focused on the three R's: reading, writing, and arithmetic, with writing receiving the least attention in the research literature (National Commission on Writing, 2003). Studies of writing performance in United States schoolchildren indicate that many are writing only at basic levels. The…

Coaching is the central activity in the "game" of teaching, and it is an activity that can have a lifetime effect on language learners. This book presents a "coaching approach" to instruction in written language--an approach that is eclectic, pragmatic, synthetic. The approach in the book centers on finding balance--ways of…

Report on an experiment at the University of Maryland. (DD)

Examined preschool children's self-management as they engaged in a literacy task of constructing an "autonomous" text for others to read. Analyzed texts for their holistic quality, and identified metacognitive utterances surrounding the texts, which showed the development of metacognition and its indications for preschoolers. (JPB)

Techniques are suggested for teaching and learning writing skills. (Text is in French.) (PMP)

Acceptance of responsibility for their written expression can be encouraged in college students through oral games which emphasize the linguistic sensibility they possessed as children. The basic elements of good written language (pleasing sounds, repetition, word play, surprise, climax) are often paralleled in riddles, game rituals, and other…

The authors describe a developmental approach for teaching expressive writing skills to learning disabled adolescents. General guidelines for remediation are outlined, and activities useful in a developmental writing approach are listed. (SW)

The traditional spelling curriculum emphasized that pupils learn to spell a specific set of words through memorization. However, major problems existed pertaining to using that method of teaching. Pupils soon forgot the correct spelling of memorized words. Educational psychologists have long advocated that pupils perceive knowledge as being…

AN ILLUSTRATED SET OF AFRICAN ANIMAL TALES HAS BEEN SELECTED AND LINGUISTICALLY STRUCTURED FOR PRACTICE IN WRITING ENGLISH COMPOSITION. FIRST USED BY FOREIGN STUDENTS AT TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, AND BY SIXTH-GRADE STUDENTS (NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH) IN MASSACHUSETTS, THESE MATERIALS ARE NOW BEING USED BY VARIOUS GROUPS IN THE…

Describes the use of oral traditional stories to teach sentence cohesion to students of English as a Foreign Language. Oral stories, when written, resemble the pupils' own work. By turning the former into a cohesive narrative, students can improve on their own stories. Temporal cohesion of the stories facilitates this practice. (PJM)

In order for students to be helped effectively to complete their writings successfully, writing centers in schools need to become more adept at "context based response." That is, writing centers need to focus not just on clarity and correctness of writing but also on the content of the assignment that students are working on. This type…

In this discussion of the reading problems of American Negro dialect speakers at intermediate grade level, the author uses the term "Public Language," because although it is not ideally satisfactory, it is free from the evaluative connotations of "Standard" English and directs attention away from distinctions of race or social class. Since the…

A study analyzed how freshman composition students handled an assignment that forced them to perform an act of sophisticated literacy which was a variation between spontaneity (present) and repetition (past) with a focus on how novice writers borrow language, whether through quotation or misquotation. The assignment involved two masterpieces of…