Intended to enhance the quality of language arts instruction in the fourth grade, this curriculum guide defines objectives, lists some basic resources, and offers suggested teaching activities. The five strands covered include language and grammar, listening, speaking, reading, and writing. An articulation chart at the beginning of the guide…

Intended to enhance the quality of language arts instruction in the fifth grade, this curriculum guide defines objectives, lists some basic resources, and offers suggested teaching activities. The five strands covered include language and grammar, listening, speaking, reading, and writing. An articulation chart at the beginning of the guide…

Defining the "product" approach to composition as that which emphasizes the finished product over the steps that led up to completion, and the "process" approach as that which emphasizes the recursive steps that lead to the final product, this paper compares these two approaches to composition instruction. The first section…

Ideas for technical writing assistance and resources that are available to Purdue University faculty who incorporate a writing component into their courses are presented in this guide. Following an introduction containing the purpose, background, and scope of the guide, three main topics and their subtopics form the guide's structure: (1)…

In Western culture literacy encompasses a constellation of values and beliefs far beyond what might be attributed to the mechanical ability to read and write. Many people prize literacy as an end in itself, and attribute to it a whole spectrum of values and social privileges disproportionate to its actual functions in society. They forget that…

One of the constants of professional life for social workers is the need to write. For this reason, the social work instructor needs to emphasize the development of students' writing skills. Such skills cannot be left to composition courses alone, nor can it be assumed that students will emerge from degree programs with sufficient writing ability.…

The organizational report and letter writing course at Ohio University (Athens) is an advanced composition course designed to help students who expect to do such writing in their future jobs, but for whom technical writing and business communication courses are either inappropriate or insufficient. Students work in groups of four, investigating a…

Noting that writing should be part of the instructional/learning strategies used in every classroom across the curriculum at all grade levels, this guide presents activities for using various kinds of writing in the content areas. The guide presents the activities according to the following writing types: (1) journal writing, (2) letter writing,…

Intended to give basic students simultaneous practice in reading and writing with an emphasis on accuracy, conciseness, and precision, the "finding the beef" method centers itself on summaries of news events. The first step of the method is to supply students with the appropriate data blocks based on news events, preferably those…

Research about writing and the teaching of writing has demonstrated that writing is a process, that thinking and writing are inextricably connected, that workshop and tutorial methods are more efficient than teacher or textbook dominated instruction in writing, and that correctness does not have to be a major concern in the teaching of writing.…

A study was conducted to examine the effects of students' interests on their writing. A group of 571 high school seniors, fluent and nonfluent in writing, completed a questionnaire dealing with aspects of writing interest, such as subject, form, or voice. Tape recorded interviews addressing the same aspects were conducted with 11 fluent seniors…

The teaching activities presented in this paper focus on expanding children's language. The paper describes (1) a "community journal" activity in which students recorded observations about events occurring in various parts of the classroom, (2) a poetry assignment using Richard Wilbur's book of poetry, "Opposites," (3) an exercise to assemble…

This study analyzes the types and frequencies of hedges and intensifiers employed in NS and NNS academic essays included in a corpus of L1 and L2 student academic texts (745 essays/220,747 words). The overarching goal of this investigation is to focus on these lexical and syntactic features of written discourse because they effectively lend…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) a text designed for basic writing students; (2) the role of the planning board in college freshman writing; (3) teaching the composing process to college level…

This guide provides a basic framework that may be implemented in any English as a second language (ESL) program comprised of the following levels: entry pre-literate, entry literate, basic, and intermediate. The program may be implemented in sessions of 5 hours or 3 hours per day of ESL instruction. The modules of instruction are: (1) oral…