The developmental writing program at Northern Virginia Community College, Manassas Campus, deals with three concerns common to developmental writing teachers at two-year colleges. First, since most developmental writing teachers are unable to empathize with, or understand, their students, the Manassas program begins with exercises which acquaint…

This book is intended to serve as a broad orientation to the discipline of language study rather than as an introduction to be employed in technical linguistics classes. The 13 chapters touch upon aspects of theoretical as well as applied linguistics, including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and language instruction. Each chapter is followed…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 29 titles deal with a vareity of topics, including the following: (1) the interrelationship of reading and writing in the composing process; (2) the relationship between composition teachers' ability to write and the writing…

This paper discusses the factors that either facilitate or inhibit vocabulary learning and suggests practical classroom techniques for beginning and more advanced students. Vocabulary acquisition is related to the learning situation and to the form, meaning, and grammatical role of the new item in the target language. The focus of the teaching…

A review of the literature on the effects upon student writing performance of variations in essay examination topics reveals that such research is sparce and that most of it has been done in the past 5 years. The review, which was conducted as part of a project to develop the writing test portion of the Florida Teacher Certification Examination,…

This paper presents a personal approach to the special pedagogical requirements of teaching writing courses for elders and specifically examines courses in poetry writing, expository prose, and prose fiction, taught to persons over 55 under the auspices of the Institute of Lifetime Learning, a nonprofit, self-supporting institution associated with…

Thinking through Writing (TTW) was a project to develop, test, and disseminate a program for teaching thinking and writing skills in secondary school English and social studies courses. Each of the 12 schools participating in the project scheduled a group of students to take an English and a social studies course in the program, and two teachers…

After 44 seventh grade students were matched in pairs according to their reading achievement test scores, one member of each pair received training in a cross-classification strategy (matrix outlining), while the other member of each pair received unrelated training. Cross-classifiable information is information that can be categorized along two…

This book is presented for teachers who do not use a reading course and who wish to produce their own material as well as for individuals developing materials for tailor-made courses. Various types of reading comprehension exercises are described and classified. The exercise-types suggested can be adapted for all reading levels. The book begins…

The technique of inviting children to discuss their writing and examining closely the nature of their comments can help to identify facets of the writing process upon which to base pedagogy. An analysis of the writing process of one sixth grade female student in an Edmonton, Canada, public school revealed the use of 38 communication units (labels…

This handbook is a set of guidelines to assist authors in preparing publications to meet two sets of criteria: requirements of federal and state government sponsors and requirements of information retrieval systems. The guidelines include both a set of written instructions and a physical model, and are sufficiently flexible to apply to research…

The reading list and assignments in this study guide are designed to involve high school students in examining the media from a nonwhite perspective. The beginning assignments require students to assemble their own bibliography relating to minority groups in the media, to examine the lives and contributions of specific Chicano, black, and American…

Most of the mechanical and content errors in the sentences written by journalism students can be attributed to four faulty patterns that can be traced to errors in the thinking process: fragmented sentence parts, personification, bureaucratic coding ("officialese"), and compressed sentences. While acceptable in spoken communication where…

Designed for use by local schools in developing language arts programs, this guide is organized into eight sections. An introductory section contains a rationale for language arts in the school program, discussions of the characteristics of a good language arts program and of student language rights, lists of general communication goals for…

Two English teachers, one in North Carolina and one in Missouri, structured a correspondence project for their senior English classes so that 60 students at each school exchanged personal letters once each week during the semester. The students responded to the project with an interest and drive that overshadowed their interest in the normal…