Try as she would, one instructor of preservice teachers could not convince her students that such skills as reading and vocabulary are not good indicators of how well a secondary student will write, especially in the case of minorities. One of the hardest sells to new teachers is that students--at all levels--should write extensively, regardless…

An advanced composition curriculum was designed for a class of 20 juniors and seniors, and because of the constraints of a university grant with which it was associated, the majority of assignments had to be collaborative. The subject of investigation was composition. That is, the students were challenged to do what composition researchers and…

Ways to develop "creative automaticity" for writing in a foreign language are examined. The paper focuses on transactional writing (i.e., writing with the purpose of transferring precise information by such means as telex messages, business letters, memoranda, and short reports), and its main features of clarity and conventionality. It is noted…

Responding to the expressed need of classroom teachers and teacher educators for a listing of available video resources which can be used for preservice and inservice education for literacy providers, this annotated bibliography identifies video resources which most fully capitalize on the potential of the medium by portraying literacy teachers…

The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund Intensive Journalistic Writing Institute, a 2-week summer workshop for Ohio high school teachers of journalism conducted in June 1991, demonstrated that the team of journalistic writing techniques and current composition pedagogy is unbeatable in fostering critical reading and writing skills. The institute focused on…

Literature instructors become frustrated as they read poorly written student essays. The problem is partly the students' lack of experience: they have not read a lot or written a lot. Literature classes can be more interesting and effective if teachers coordinate two kinds of emphases: allowing for discovery and moving toward productivity. In…

Arguing that remedial/developmental students' lack of exposure to the fine arts relegates them to a permanent underclass within the student body, this paper describes the use of poetry, music, and other materials drawn from the fine arts in a remedial writing class. After presenting a rationale for including artistic concerns in the developmental…

Collaboration in the classroom is a major theme of educational reform today. Electronically-supported conversation (ESC) is one way of using technology to support collaboration in the classroom. ESC offers several instructional benefits over simple spoken discourse. We describe a simple model ("two cans and a string") for how ESC could…

This study reports the results of two experiments involving a focus on the rhetorical functions of generalization and classification in the teaching of the writing skill to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in Iran. The main research question is whether the teaching of language functions is relevant in the development of writing ability…

This is the final report of the Microcomputers and Literacy Project, which was primarily concerned with sociolinguistic analysis of written texts and classroom discourse from two urban, sixth-grade classrooms using computers with QUILL writing software. The report argues for and illustrates an approach to the study of writing that integrates…

Part of a larger ethnographic study, this investigation focused on the literacy development of a college student as he participated in the virtual culture of a computer-networked writing classroom where all instruction and communication occurred through the computer. The student was a member of one of two classes of adult students, ranging in age…

This book, intended for teachers of grades 1-3, offers a step-by-step model for teaching writing. Each of the book's 15 mini-lessons includes a model lesson, lists of picture books suited to the writing skill being taught, samples of children's writing, and ideas for extending the lesson. The book's lessons cover exploring ideas for writing,…

Two years ago an instructor left a large public university to teach composition at the University of Findlay, a small private coeducational institution located in a city of 36,000 people south of Toledo, Ohio. Describing the differences between small and large schools, he touches upon the more personalized student-teacher interactions at Findlay.…

A study at Hawaii Pacific University investigated the use of collaborative peer feedback to improve student performance in an intermediate English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) writing course. Subjects were 53 students of widely varying language backgrounds in three class sections. Each section received differential preparation for peer feedback: (1)…

This dissertation investigates community college students' and their teachers' perceptions about writing in a beginning composition course. The study explores their views about composition, discusses possible conflicts regarding different ways writing can be defined, and offers suggestions to resolve tension. The means by which educators and…