Background: In Taiwan, traditional college science teaching concentrates on the direct transmission of knowledge or facts from instructors to students and thereby involves non-interactive teaching activities. Some researchers recommend that college faculties should be moving away from lectures as a means of instruction and increasing opportunities…

Writing expressive essays is especially difficult for many students with learning and behavior difficulties. They struggle not only with basic writing skills such as spelling, sentence formation, capitalization, and handwriting, but also with the cognitive processes of writing such as planning, organizing, and writing (Schumaker & Deshler, 2003).…

The 15 articles in this volume comprise the refereed proceedings of the 2009 ATLAANZ (Association of Tertiary Learning Advisors Aotearoa/New Zealand) conference. The first three chapters focus on collaborative work. In Chapter 1, Ann Pocock shares her experiences of working with other university support services. In Chapter 2, Berni Cooper and…

Fourth grade is an important year for literacy learning. Having left the primary grades behind, students must grapple with more demanding texts and content material. Effective, motivating instruction can help them succeed. This book helps teachers create an energized and organized learning environment in which all students can improve their…

In this qualitative teacher-researcher one-year classroom study, the author focused upon the literacy strategies that four low-achieving writers used while creating and interpreting music video compositions. The students read a variety of musical and video texts as they composed their own music video project. The guiding question of this research…

Readily accessible computer technologies including on-line notepads provide new environments for notetaking. This study sought to describe the effects of technology on the notetaking strategies and behaviors of university students. The following questions were addressed: (1) Given a choice, do students prefer taking notes from a computer tutorial…

Rather than having established forms available to pour things into, forms frequently need to be built from the ground up. Practically, it is simpler to use assembly line production for academic work, and most of academic writing is relatively linear objective prose. However, boundaries are being crossed in diverse disciplines by a number of…

Teachers know that these metaphors affect the teaching of composition: the banking concept of knowledge, student ownership of writing, and writing as risk-taking. However, these metaphors explain more to teachers and less to students who are writers. When teachers speak of the writing process in such terms as mapping, voicing, and brainstorming,…

Designed to address writing problems experienced by researchers and managers, this book suggests practical steps researchers can take and effective actions managers can implements to cut costs, improve document usefulness, and upgrade writing skills. The book explains how to: (1) organize a technical/business document; (2) select information…

Social studies teachers need to stress the concept of writing in the social studies. A quality curriculum advocates that learners write across the curriculum. Creating experience charts, developing and writing outlines, writing book reports and developing various activities around library books read, and writing diary entries are all activities…

A literature review traced a major theoretical shift in the understanding of how people read--from the passive reader who receives and decodes information to the strategic reader who actively chooses what, when, and how to read, reads interpretively, and interprets a text (such as a newspaper article) as an organized structure. The result is a…

Mikhail Bakhtin's understanding of the medieval carnival--a time when life is turned upside down, social hierarchies are lifted, and the lines between performer and participant are blurred--provides a useful framework for understanding both liberatory and potentially threatening aspects of writing workshops in elementary schools. An experimental…

Students may forget that writing involves a relationship between writer and audience--a relationship foregrounded by speech-act theory. The writer should focus on what the audience is to be led to see about the subject. To be distinguished are "locution" (saying something), "illocution" (performance of an act in saying…

By looking for patterns of errors in the research papers of Asian students, educators can uncover pedagogical strategies to help students avoid repeating such errors. While a good deal of research has identified a number of sentence-level problems which are typical of Asian students writing in English, little attempt has been made to consider the…

While many factors contribute to success and/or failure in ABE (Adult Basic Education) and ASE (Adult Secondary Education) activities, ABE and ASE writers will succeed or fail in direct correlation to what is happening to their self-esteem in the context of writing instruction. The first guideline for teaching writing to adults is telling the…