A study examined whether teaching a specific reading strategy could improve the reading comprehension and memory of young (18 to 32) and older (62 and older) high school educated adults with average to high vocabulary test scores. The "plan strategy" was identified through an examination of what more than 1,000 adults wrote down as they…

The contexts and purposes for civic writing may influence the composition process as well as text features, and an analysis of the purposes and audiences for civic writing might yield an insight into the way that such writing stimulates the personal and moral development of both its readers and writers. An examination of two related pieces written…

The film "Pieces of a Puzzle" (part of the series "Writers Writing" that was coproduced by WNET and Learning Designs and televised by WNET in 1985), helped students become better writers and facilitated the discovery of material and techniques appropriate to academic writing. First, students were introduced to reader response…

This newsletter issue concentrates on the topic of teaching written language skills to mildly handicapped elementary and secondary students, with emphasis on the communicative function of writing. The feature article discusses expository writing instruction, describing essential elements of the expository writing process and characteristics of…

Using self-instructional strategy training procedures, three sixth-grade learning disabled students were taught a series of self-directed prompts designed to facilitate the generation, framing, and planning of written compositions. The eight-step instructional procedure included pretraining, review of baseline performance level, description of the…

Intended for ninth grade English students, the units of study in this course syllabus cover listening and speaking, written composition, writing mechanics, language study, and literature. The activities in the syllabus are arranged so that upon completion of the course, students will be able to (1) participate in, evaluate, and resolve conflicts…

In the business writing class, teachers should consider the following suggestions: (1) capture students' interest and involve them, (2) prepare them for life outside the English classroom, (3) help them better understand the writing process, and (4) show them that writing occurs in a context that includes a writer, one or more readers, and a host…

Assuming that freshman research papers can be interesting as well as educational, this book presents ten sample student papers selected from classes in which research methods were taught through the use of newspapers and periodicals. The paper topics, based on real people and actual events, range from bizaare murder cases and treasure expeditions…

The articles in this journal issue explore various aspects of the teaching of composition. Topics include the types of activities and research that rhetoricians will be doing in the future, areas in which composition research is needed, dealing with dialect differences in the composition classroom, and helping students to develop their writing…

The writing assignments developed for a course in expository writing intended for gifted eighth grade students are described in this paper. The first assignment described is a causal analysis essay that required the students to examine events from their lives or from newspaper articles and analyze the causes of the actions involved. The paper…

Intended to help teachers in developing language arts curriculum materials for use with recent Cuban refugees to the United States, this paper contains 300 topics for creative and expository writing based on the roots of the Cuban culture. The topics cover a variety of subjects, including food preparation, memories of Cuba, experiences in a new…

To test the hypothesis that paragraphs composed of sentences with identical or closely related topics (the grammatical subject and its adjuncts) would be easier to read than a paragraph whose sentence topics were only remotely related, two experiments on the readability of paragraphs were conducted. The first experiment involved subjective…

This booklet is one of a series of teacher-written curriculum publications launched by the Bay Area Writing Project, each focusing on a different aspect of the teaching of composition. Step-by-step directions are provided to develop small writing response groups in any junior high or high school classroom, whether English, science, or social…

A sequential series of writing assignments designed and tested for a tenth grade writing workshop through the cooperative efforts of college and technical high school English teachers is discussed in this paper. Twelve assignments and their underlying educational theories are explained. The first six assignments are described as progressive and…

This paper describes a variable-credit advanced writing course that allows non-English majors to set their own goals for writing and to develop specific writing skills that apply to their major fields. The course is a unitized sequence of three five-week sessions. The first session discusses the theoretical product model and process model for the…