This paper integrates several contemporary issues, all of which focus on the teaching of human developmental theories. These issues include postmodern thought, higher level thinking processes, introducting conceptual conflict and arousal, motivation, and integrating the writing process into the psychology curriculum. Each issue is briefly…

A study examined the role of talk in the writing act. The study utilized participant observational techniques in an attempt to discover how talk was implicated in all stages of writing. Subjects were three fourth, fifth, and/or sixth grade informants, with one student emerging as the key informant in the study. Results indicated that talk appeared…

A study examined the assumption that writing is a way to learn by examining the relative effects of writing and studying as learning aids. The study also explored the role of individual differences in an effort to identify features of the writing process that may influence what students learn through writing. The experiment used think-aloud…

Re-entry female students are unique in one particularly important way: they respond and grow under even the most difficult conditions. The classroom and the text are two contexts in which the factor of gender appears to have affected these students' attitudes toward writing and their expectations as writers. Central to both of these contexts are…

A study analyzed and described the writing development of 24 children in a multiethnic inner city classroom in Canada to learn whether there were measurable differences among native speakers, bilinguals, and English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) beginners. Writing samples were analyzed for describing, interpreting, generalizing, and speculating…

The function of basic writing in the university is to teach students whose language practices are most distant from prestige forms to use language in ways which will enable their advancement in college and in the world outside. In composition studies, the awareness that the intelligent activity of students can produce apparently…

Technical writing instructors lack a framework for evaluating pedagogical materials. One framework for classification divides the pedagogical materials into three groups: those locating their heuristics in form, context, and method. Formal pedagogies (the modes, sentence generation) can produce generic writing, separated from audience, purpose,…

The relationships between the understandings children develop while learning the written form of their own names and those developed while learning other words were examined in a study. Twelve children, aged three, four, and five, were selected. The study involved three tasks which examined the subjects' expertise with letters, numbers, and the…

Extending an earlier Donald Graves study by including students over seven years of age, this study identified relationships among the nature of writing tasks assigned by teachers and the written responses of elementary school students to those tasks. One class each at the third, fifth, and seventh grade levels provided eighteen sets of writing…

Theoretical issues related to the parallel role of internal revision in reading and writing are explored in this paper, which explains that meanings generated during reading or writing are always tentative and that readers and writers must build and maintain a continuous text world. The paper next examines criteria for evaluating the continuity of…

The reader response criticism that has arisen in direct response to the New Criticism can be adapted to the needs of the developing writer through its emphasis upon the experience of the reader engaged with the text. The reader response approach generates content--helps the developing writer find something to say--and facilitates the process…

Most performer-writers accept the writing process simply as a means to an end: the shared performance event with a live audience. While writer-performers regard a script as more important than the performance, a solo performance is, however, a showcase of the artist's talent, and creating one's own text offers the performer artistic control. Some…

Writers' comments on writing can help teachers incorporate within their classrooms the idea that writing is a process of discovery. They can remind students and teachers how important enthusiasm, motivation, and reinforcement are. Even though such comments are not saying anything new, saying the same thing in new terminology can lead to new…

A consideration of real world language use yields five questions that could prove helpful in assessing student writing achievements: (1) What is the writer's purpose or intention? (2) What audience does the writer have in mind? (3) What are the organizing principles of the piece? (4) What range of experience and knowledge might one reasonably…

To describe and analyze the revision processes of a group of college freshmen and a group of experienced adult writers, eight freshman students and seven experienced adult writers were asked to write three compositions, rewrite each composition two times, suggest revisions for a composition written by an anonymous author, and be interviewed three…