The study described in this article sought to compare the effects of English language brainstorming activities with similar activities conducted in French in terms of their effects on the coherence of compositions drafted by intermediate-level college French students. (Author/VWL)

Analysis of questionnaires completed by 715 undergraduate psychology students identified four patterns associated with writing term papers: (1) a minimal-drafting strategy; (2) an outline-and-develop strategy; (3) a detailed-planning strategy; and (4) a "think-then-do" strategy. Detailed-planning and think-then-do strategies appeared to result in…

This article discusses the development of the story form, examines the written narrative patterns of students with learning disabilities, and discusses the reasons for their difficulties with this genre of writing. Instructional approaches are presented that have been effective in improving written narrative skills of these students. (Contains…

Describes a year-long study of five fifth grade students with learning disabilities with written language deficits that used a specially designed computer program, ROBO-Writer, as a writing tool to assist them in a weekly writing curriculum. Discusses effects on the students' behavior, attitudes, and their written products. (Contains 32…

Presents an art lesson for second-grade students that was inspired by the book "Grandpa's Face" by Eloise Greenfield. Comments that the students each wrote a descriptions of their grandfather's face, compared the artwork of Chuck Close and Vincent Van Gogh, and then made clay representations of their grandfather's face using abstract…

Describes a course design which tries to incorporate the investigative approach into the curriculum. Uses a project-oriented approach where students formulate questions and hypotheses and design experiments. Recommends the design for elementary school teachers who trained in science through traditional methods. (Contains 12 references.) (YDS)

Self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) is presented as way that middle school students with learning disabilities can learn task-specific strategies for composing. A strategy for planning expository essays is discussed, along with the PLAN and WRITE strategies for teaching basic parts of an essay, different types of sentences, synonyms, and…

Discusses the role of writing instruction in assisting literacy development in middle school students. Develops a research-based rationale for having all students write frequently each day, and shows three strategies for integrating writing practice with regular classroom instruction. (JPB)

Discusses teaching argument using participatory action research (PAR), a recent phrase for the old idea of learning by practice. Describes the use of hypothetical cases that provide a context-rich series of overlapping issues, which involve students as principals, and which are addressed and resolved through reading, analysis of various arguments,…

Examined the extent to which kindergartners used computer speech during narrative writing and the relationship between this use and the linguistic properties of their written products. Found that length of text, grammatical cohesion, and lexical density were strongly associated with use of computer-generated spoken feedback. Narrative types and…

When administrators put their ideas into writing, they produce a durable public record. An administrator's paper trail should compliment rather than haunt its creator. Effective communicators treat writing as a reflective process that helps sharpen and clarify ideas and considers both audience and purpose. (Contains 17 references.) (MLH)

Identifies a set of writing conventions whose primary function is to monitor the development of a crucial component of narrative, the crisis of the story, but that are also customarily used by skilled writers to enhance the attention-getting power of their expository writing. Shows that English-as-a-Second-Language learners who have not learned to…

Discusses the ongoing debate in the field of language assessment concerning the relative strengths of analytic versus holistic composition rating scales. Uses multiple regression analysis and exploratory factor analysis to evaluate both methods, and finds that because different rating scales measure different constructs, they cause the meaning of…

Examines how differences in point of view influence the story production of Japanese English-as-a-foreign-language students with different levels of English proficiency. Students wrote two narrative stories based on the same series of pictures, one in the first-person perspective and the other in the third-person perspective. Sample writings were…

Explored an alternative approach to short essay writing on language assessment tasks. Thirty-nine intermediate learners of French performed two essay writing tasks: writing directly in French and writing in the first language and then translating into French. Two-thirds of students did better on the direct writing task across all rating scales;…