Three studies were conducted to investigate the development of the ability of individuals of varying ages to use macrorules for paraphrasing expository text. Macrorules were defined as the general rules of deletion, superordination, selection, and invention that underlie comprehension of prose. In the first study, 18 fifth grade, 16 seventh grade,…

Designed primarily for the use of language arts teachers in the secondary schools, this inservice resource booklet provides a consistent emphasis on developing and strengthening skills in functional and creative writing. Following an introduction, the booklet presents a brief guide for the inservice leader, and a self-corrective test for teachers…

Two studies were designed to investigate the age at which students adapt expository writing to meet the needs of different audiences. In the first study, students in grades four, eight, twelve, and at university level wrote descriptions of geometric figures that would enable someone unfamiliar with a figure to draw it. For all grades, realistic…

Argues in favor of teaching writing in the FL class. The following specifics are discussed: 1) When should writing begin? 2) When should written work occur in a largely oral lesson? 3) How is writing introduced? 4) Which written exercises are worth doing? 5) When can creative writing begin? 6) Writing as a response to reality. (KM)

A college expository writing instructor investigated how students perceive teacher intervention during the writing process and how written teacher comments affect successive drafts of student compositions. During the semester, four students were asked to react on tape to the comments the instructor wrote on the second drafts of their compositions…

A study examined the use of context clues in identifying unknown words embedded in three types of text (fiction, exposition, and science). Subjects were 24 eighth grade students who read three passages at the fifth grade level, each with four content words deleted from them and replaced with pseudowords. Context clues for these pseudowords were…

Intended to help teachers in developing language arts curriculum materials for use with the children of recent Bahamian immigrants to the United States, this paper contains approximately 500 topics for creative and expository writing based on the roots of Bahamian culture. The topics are arranged into areas of interest, including Bahamian pride,…

As part of a series of documents providing language arts materials adapted for use by children in refugee populations, this list offers 200 topics for creative and expository writing based on the Haitian culture. These topics, which can also be used as stimuli for writing activities by children from the Antilles and students interested in…

M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan have provided a system for analyzing the cohesive relations that enable a sequence of T-units to be considered a complete text. (A T-unit consists of a main clause and all its dependent clauses.) These concepts of cohesion proved effective in analyzing the differences between five "high" and five "low" quality essays…

A study was conducted to investigate: (1) what linguistic and mental abilities are involved in composition; (2) to what extent undergraduate students in India possess these abilities, in English and in their native language; and (3) to what extent these abilities are being taught. The major portion of the paper discusses the nature of composition,…

A course in technical writing has justification for appearing in a college English department curriculum if course content as it is currently taught is somewhat modified. In general, business or technical writing has been primarily a study of a wide variety of letter and report writing forms. To be taught as a liberal arts course, a technical…

A semester-long faculty seminar at Hunter College involved teachers from 14 disciplines in weekly meetings regarding writing in the subject areas. Although the teachers read literature on writing and heard from outside writing experts, they spent most of the time working together on designing and criticizing writing assignments for their classes…

The 22 articles in this collection, written by experienced teachers of English, present effective learning activities for developing a variety of skills, qualities, and attitudes in writing. Demonstrating different teaching methods, the articles relate to key principles advocated by the National Writing Project: attention to fluency, peer…

Much recent research into college writing has focused on syntactic measurements. Significant problems inherent in such use of these indices arise for their validity at and beyond the college level and center on the terms "maturity,""complexity," and "growth.""Maturity" has not been satisfactorily defined, nor has the level of competence been…

Designed to stimulate reluctant writers in grades five through eight, these 40 uncompleted stories were written by a teacher who has used them with success in the classroom. The stories are arranged by length and complexity, and topics range from tales of childhood experiences to accounts of history, nature, and science fiction. A section…