THE USEFULNESS OF MODERN GRAMMAR, PARTICULARLY OF KNOWLEDGE OF LANGUAGE PATTERNS, IN FACILITATING READING EFFICIENCY IS CONSIDERED IN A DISCUSSION OF THE IMPLICATIONS OF STRUCTURE IN LANGUAGE FOR THE TEACHING OF READING. THE FOLLOWING TOPICS ARE DISCUSSED--(1) THE DUAL CONCEPT OF MEANING, (2) THE FOUR STAGES OF LANGUAGE STRUCTURE (SOUNDS,…

The COMP-LAB, a CUNY-based writing course combining classroom instruction with an autotutorial writing laboratory for students deficient in standard written English, is described and evaluated in this assessment. The background and purpose of the project are discussed in the first two sections, prior to an extensive description of the project…

This final report summarizes an extensive evaluation of the COMP-LAB project, a course which integrates carefully defined classroom instruction with an autotutorial writing laboratory for teaching basic writing and rhetoric, particularly to students impaired by foreign language or nonstandard speech. Information on the project background and the…

As one of five modules focusing on specific writing skills, this learning module on the sentence is intended for use in a one-semester course on written communication or as a supplement to other courses where written communication skills are included. The materials, designed so that they may be used in either a teacher-directed or an…

There are three standard complaints given by teachers of freshman composition: (1) college freshman students are inferior to English majors and graduate students, or inferior to freshmen from when the teachers were in college; (2) the subject matter of a writing course is inferior to that of literature courses; and (3) those who teach composition…

In the many conferences, workshops, and panels for writing instructors the role of director of freshman English has been routinely ignored. The typical director does not even have a job description. But directors should interpret this lack of specifics to mean that they are not administrators set apart from faculty, but are engaged with faculty in…

Recent research supports the theory that unskilled writers produce writing through the mediation of spoken language. That is, their writing contains inexplicit meanings, or semantic abbreviations, characteristic of conversations in which the listener is familiar with the situational and cultural contexts of the monologue. Two studies further…

Before teachers who trust neither their own nor their students' writing abilities can become proud and self-confident teachers of writing, they need redevelopment in a longterm inservice program based on the trainer's respect for them as learners. The format for such a course is simple: teachers write each week (choosing their own subjects and…

It was hypothesized that writers of sentence pairs with clear relationships would have better recall of second sentences than would writers of sentence pairs with unclear relationships. Clear connections between sentences in sentence pairs were defined as those sentences in which the language of the first sentence was explicitly picked up in the…

Courses in college composition taught as part of the University of South Carolina's program at the Women's Correctional Center in Columbia, South Carolina, (a minimum security state prison) have proved valuable to prisoners. Despite the problems encountered, including lack of cooperation from the prison administration and inadequacy of available…

A model for assessing student writing achievement uses sets of criteria to chart students' writing progress that are based on a study of exemplary samples of student writing produced at various stages of development. The model provides a viable alternative to assessment methods that call for students to produce lengthy essays on preselected topics…

Twenty-eight composition teachers at a large university, a two-year college, and an engineering college, all of whom had taught composition through both the tutorial method and typical classroom methods, were interviewed regarding advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches. Among the advantages of tutorials mentioned were the chance to…

Intended for reluctant readers as well as for readers with a special interest in detective stories, this high school English course consists of the following eight units: the history of detective fiction, the psychology of violent crime, crime and society, the procedures of crime detection, the mind of the detective, analysis of the detective…

This guide is intended for use by Idaho educators in implementing courses to meet that state's new composition requirements for high school students. Following a brief overview of the new requirements, the major section of the guide presents information about class size, teacher qualifications, and materials needed for the courses. The role of…

One of a series of teaching guides produced by the Wisconsin Writing Project, this booklet focuses on suggestions for teaching reading and writing in elementary, middle, and high school language arts classrooms. The first section offers 16 reading/writing activities, a list of topics for language experience stories, and an annotated list of…