This article focuses on the process of promoting academic achievement for second-language learners by imaginatively connecting expository comprehension. The goals of this article are: (1) to increase understanding of instructional strategies among teachers at all levels that impact on reading comprehension in the content areas for second language…

This paper focuses on one approach to making research students more reflexive in their writing. It is argued that the development of the ability to be reflexive in regard to their own qualitative research does not come easily to a significant number of students. A range of possibilities which supervisors might present to their research students as…

In the Australian state of Victoria, students from elite independent and Catholic schools dominate entry into elite universities. Nonetheless, there are a small number of schools within the government sector whose students succeed in these terms. Such schools are considered highly academic and entry is very difficult. This paper is based on…

Accessible and user-friendly, this volume presents evidence-based practices for integrating language and literacy knowledge to enhance children's learning in today's standards-based classrooms. While grounded in theory and research, the book focuses on day-to-day concerns in instruction and intervention, identifying models for effective…

Using the newspaper to provide opportunities for students to learn current events and further develop writing skills is described. Seven activities outline how to use cooperative learning to teach current events. Four types of assignments based on newspapers develop various types of writing skills: (1) personal writing; (2) descriptive writing;…

First year writing students were asked which kinds of writing they enjoyed, and why. Their responses indicate a preference for "creative" writing, where "creative" is defined as "personal." The students in the research sample reacted against a form of knowing that requires them to place more emphasis on objects (human…

In Sweden the International Association Evaluation of Educational Achievement in written composition study involved 4,500 students from grades 6 and 9, as well as students from the terminal grades of the upper secondary school. Students wrote essays of various kinds and replied to questionnaires. Essays were evaluated according to content,…

Prepared by classroom teachers, the papers in this collection combine practical knowledge with recent findings from writing research. Among the topics discussed in the 25 papers are (1) student teacher conferences, (2) using poetry to develop writing fluency, (3) writing as a learning process, (4) oral and written discourse, (5) creative dramatics…

Computer use in the English classroom has the potential to help students enjoy and integrate their learning of writing and reading of literature in new ways. This new relationship between the student and machine-readable text can be thought of in terms of Alvin Toffler's theory of the "prosumer," a person who uses Information Age…

A study examined the differences and similarities in the relationship between the organization of written English produced by native Chinese, English, and Spanish speaking adult college students when they wrote in the narrative and expository modes. Specifically, the study explored the kinds of cohesive devices that operated in the English text…

To investigate how writing might be affected by composing aloud and computer composing--two factors that are increasingly being used either to study composing processes or to alter the typical context in which students write--a study described the composing process of five junior high school students. The students wrote four compositons, one in…

A university writing faculty conducted a study of the concepts of unity in expository prose and of sentence structure as understood by Arabic, Malay, and Spanish speakers to discover why some students grasp some concepts more readily than others. Interviews, surveys, and analysis of written compositions revealed that the reason lies in ways these…

The articles in this journal focus on the teaching of composition at the secondary and college levels. Separate articles deal with the causes of poor proofreading by students and methods for teaching proofreading skills; the use of folklore as an aid to teaching composition; techniques for overcoming students' fear of failure in the writing…

Two experiments examined the effects of definition and synonym as context clues embedded in three types of text (fiction, exposition, and science). It was predicted that (1) type of text would influence clue usage; (2) difficulty of the text, based on increasingly more detailed complex information, would interfere with the use of clues; (3) clue…

Seven papers are presented which deal with current topics of interest to educators. A case study of a mentally retarded boy placed in a regular classroom illustrates the possibilities of teaching children to accept diversity and deviance from their accepted norms of behavior. A compendium of policy papers prepared for the House of Representatives…