THIS FIFTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE NCTE COMMITTEE ON PROMISING PRACTICES CONTAINS 24 PIECES BY CLASSROOM TEACHERS ABOUT INNOVATIVE TECHNIQUES WHICH THEY HAVE FOUND TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH. THE 15 FULL-LENGTH ARTICLES ARE GATHERED UNDER TWO HEADS, "READING AND LITERATURE" AND "WRITING." IN ADDITION, NINE BRIEF DESCRIPTIONS OF…

Literature can play a prominent part in revitalizing the teaching of English because it can provide students with both immediate and future rewards. As an immediate reward, literature allows students to imaginatively experience situations which they have not yet encountered. It thus acts acts as a liberating force for young people from the…

Two-year colleges can furnish inservice training for their own English teachers. A description is given of an inservice program for composition teachers which involves (1) a strong syllabus, (2) creative supervision, (3) seminar programs, (4) inservice publication. (BN)

This bibliography lists separately, with price and publisher, Greek and Latin works published in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. While bilingual and interlinear texts are omitted in favor of annotated editions of authors, the inclusion of a vocabulary or occasional translation is indicated. Entries appear in the following categories:…

Freshmen enrolled in regular and remedial sections of English were surveyed to determine the amount of instruction and practice in expository composition received during high school. Results showed that the total amount of instruction was relatively low for both groups of students: only 15% of remedial students and 25% of regular English students…

This paper points out that students who earn a Ph.D. in English in a conventional literary curriculum are often totally ignorant of linguistics, rhetoric, and current research in the teaching and learning of composition. Yet such knowledge is invaluable for many reasons. Graduate students can become more accurate critics of their own writing, if…

In research in the teaching of writing, feedback--information about a performance which influences future performance--appears often to be a factor, but it is rarely adequately described, defined, or controlled. The first section of this paper identifies possibly important aspects of feedback as it relates to the teaching of writing. Feedback may…

The object of this book is to aid copywriters in creating effective advertising. It suggests orderly procedures for planning advertising, as well as some simple writing guidelines. Chapters discuss the function of the copywriter, organization and relationships, adapting advertising for the medium in which it will appear, applying psychology, basic…

A study of 94 students was undertaken in an attempt to support the hypothesis that remedial English instruction in college can result in measurable improvement in student writing. These students, chosen randomly from 376 prospective remedial students were divided into seven different writing classes which met for one-hour class sessions four days…

Georgia Institute of Technology has created a preparatory workshop that avoids focusing composition courses on the state competency exam while helping its students pass the exam. In checking the exams of students who had failed, three problems appeared: lack of motivation, lack of awareness of the standards for grading the exam, and an inability…

An English course tailored to the needs of non-English majors has been developed and implemented at West Texas State University. Students from the business world as well as from a wide variety of disciplines participate in the course, which empahsizes the principles of communication. In addition to a text specifically written for the course,…

This paper describes a systematic approach to composition instruction and provides evidence of that system's successful implementation. The approach is based on Benjamin S. Bloom's Taxonomy and has five stages: presenting the student with reasons for learning the material, listing immediate and long-range instructional objectives, preassessing…

The significance of authors' reading notes may lie not only in their mechanical function as information storage devices providing raw materials for writing, but also in their ability to concentrate and to mobilize the latent emotional and creative resources of their keepers. This document examines records of reading found in the published…

The study investigated the effectiveness of a flexible modular system for teaching composition. It was hypothesized that measures of compositional ability would significantly favor students in the experimental course, and students in the experimental course would register significantly higher in affective measures of interest and involvement. The…

This paper describes the value of the cloze procedure for teaching language and composition, classroom diagnosis of language difficulties, and research into the process of composition. Any aspect of language structure, including word order, form class words, connectives, inflectional endings, and function words, could be taught through use of the…