The writing center at Bluefield State College (West Virginia) is called the SPICE Center, SPICE being an acronym for Self Paced Instruction for Competency in English. In addition to emphasizing skill acquisition and flexibility, it stresses face-to-face evaluation of written work, and places heavy emphasis on writing as process instead of writing…

Materials pertinent to a study that surveyed and interviewed writing faculty and staff of the 19 campuses of The California State University are assembled in this volume. Various sections of the volume contain (1) a faculty questionnaire, (2) a campus fact sheet, (3) interview protocols for department chair and program coordinators, (4) a taxonomy…

Divided into two sections, this report outlines several components of computer based instruction in the composing process. The first section, which focuses on the use of computers in editing, generating ideas, and producing text, presents a users' manual for composition instruction on a microcomputer, a general description of how computer based…

An approach to writing for high school and college students is presented in this brief article. AUTHOR'S COMMENT (excerpt): The science fiction course I teach is an elective that enrolls about fifty students per class. Ninety percent or more of the students are not English majors and have done little writing in the recent past. Assigning frequent…

Attempting to place in an American context many of the ideas about the teaching of writing that were first developed in England, this book contains contributions from internationally prominent teachers/scholars who attended the New York University-CBS Sunrise Semester course on learning to write and writing to learn. The text also reflects the…

Reflecting concerns for the present state of and current trends in English education on an international scope, the articles in these conference proceedings focus on the multicultural environment, teacher education, and research in English instruction. Following an opening address on the past and future of English teaching, the remaining articles…

Intended to help secondary school composition instructors develop a useful, pragmatic unit on technical writing, this monograph explores the theory, research, and pedagogy of technical writing. The first section discusses the purpose and forms of technical writing, as well as elements of technical style including diction, paragraphing, and…

Useful for writing teachers at all levels, this monograph explores the nature of writing apprehension and presents nonthreatening teaching and evaluation methods. The first section of the booklet examines theory and research on writing anxiety and its effects, along with some teaching behaviors likely to aggravate the problem. The second section…

Composition teachers can learn much from the tradition of psychologist and researcher Carl R. Rogers. Placing the direction of the therapeutic process in the hands of the client, Rogers's work focuses on "potentiality," the idea that humans are primed with a potential for self-realization and are endowed with an actualizing tendency to…

An advanced writing class for English majors and minors in the teaching curriculum is designed to help encourage professional writing from public school teachers. The course involves extensive reading of professional journals, discussion of journals, and several writing assignments. Panel discussions on journals promote familiarity with…

In this paper, the role of computers in writing process was investigated. Last 25 years of journals were searched to find related articles. Articles and books were classified under prewriting, composing, and revising and editing headings. The review results showed that computers can make writers' job easy in the writing process. In addition,…

The authors of this essay regularly require students to engage in informal writing as a means to promote learning. One form of informal writing is the summary/reaction journal. In summary/reaction journals, students read a chapter or article, write a summary of that reading, and then react by offering their own insights and responses to the…

This article outlines a lesson plan which contains four activities based on the cultural content of quilts. It includes activities for teaching vocabulary and grammar, speaking, writing, and a dicto-comp activity (in which there is both dictation and composition).

A study examined the effect of role playing on persuasive letters written by 84 fourth and 70 eighth graders. Role playing was defined as improvised, unrehearsed oral interaction in a simulated context. Randomly selected students from 11 comparable heterogeneous classes in a middle-class suburb wrote to their school principals on three different…

Interdepartmental rivalries between literature instruction and composition instruction have contributed to viewing reading and writing as disconnected activities. One solution to this divisiveness is a course in "the journal as a literary tradition," which combines reading and writing in equal portions. Students first learn about the…