The experience of a writing teacher who taught fourth and fifth graders how to take notes, describe what they observed, interview, write quickly, amd edit their own work are presented. Searching for ideas, gathering and sifting, finding a focus, rethinking and correcting, and reaching an audience are discussed. (MLW)

Investigates the relationship between topic-specific background knowledge and measures of overall quality, coherence, syntactic complexity, audience, and function in the expository writing of tenth grade students. (HOD)

Students will combine reading in the detective fiction genre with expository writing. Embedded in this unit are reading and writing skills, such as defining, editing, explaining, illustrating, justifying, revising, supporting, and validating. During fifteen 40-minute lessons, grade 6-8 students will: recognize a form of literature according to its…

Describes the Weehawken, New Jersey, individualized language arts program to develop better ways of teaching writing and composition through diagnosing student writing needs, using prescriptive teaching techniques, and evaluating student progress. Validated by the Office of Education, the program has spread across the country. (MF)

Discusses short extracts from essays written by first-year undergraduates following an English-as-a-Second-Language medium humanities curriculum at the University of Hong Kong. Some of the wording reflected unintended knowledge claims. Feedback sessions on students' essays looked into ways in which a writer's factual or evaluative claims might be…

Integrating writing into the mathematics classroom is often met with resistance by teachers. Presented are ideas to help teachers implement four forms of writing appropriate for the mathematics class: (1) logbooks; (2) journals; (3) expository writing; and (4) creative writing. Specific examples and suggestions for classroom activities for each…

Maintains that creative writing should be no less a part of the elementary social-studies writing program than other expository forms. Discusses using the poetic form, the cinquain, to teach about Mexican vaqueras and vaqueros in an elementary unit on the American Southwest. Includes illustrations and instructional materials. (MJP)

A study investigated three issues: (1) differences between two types of rhetorical organization of expository text (problem-solution pattern and collection-of-descriptions pattern) in the reading recall of second-language readers; (2) differences between the two types on reading recall of readers at two levels; and (3) relationship between the…

The effects of analogical and schematic illustrations on the comprehension and retention of expository prose were compared. The population was 191 eighth-grade students at Mahomet Junior High School, Illinois; 134 students' scores were used. Subjects were assigned to two groups through the random distribution of treatment booklets that included a…

This magazine, created by local units of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) through its Worker-Family Education Program, is a collection of personal opinions, reports, and creative writing with illustrations. Articles include: an interview with a fellow union member; statements on aspects of the culture of native countries;…

A study examined the effects of a comprehensive writing program for average and slightly below average high school students on student writing achievement and attitudes. The program aimed to provide remedial instruction to improve writing skills, since 89% of the school's upper middle class population matriculate in some sort of college degree…

The 23 original essays on sentence combining in this volume range in focus from classroom methodology and effectiveness, through theoretical issues and syntactic constructions, to current issues in the field. The essays and their authors are as follows: (1) "The Role of the Elaborated Dominant Nominal in the Measurement of Conceptual and…

Given that the task of freshman composition is to initiate students into the multidisciplinary academic discourse community, English teachers can speed up the novice's introduction more effectively than can specialists in those disciplines by having students observe, analyze, and produce the salient features of a discourse community's…

In order to investigate the text structure/reading comprehension relationship, this paper reviews recent research on text representation theories. Text structure investigation--research on semantic memory as it is concerned with meaning from the word level through the inference level--follows the premise that sentences are understood in the…

A selection of the papers from a symposium on the application of linguistic concepts to teaching composition are contained in this document. The papers and authors are as follows: "Introduction: Coherence, Composition, and Text Linguistics" (Nils Erik Enkvist); "TUAP and the Teaching of Writing in Sweden" (Lennart Bjork): "Discourse-Level…