Collaborative learning, in which students form small groups to analyze their own writing, can cause students who recognize good writing and know the "rules" to reexamine their own writing and writing processes and then produce an acceptable product. Given eight sample paragraphs from their own writing, 20 freshman students working in 5…

Intended to provide school principals and administrators with suggestions for leading a schoolwide writing improvement effort, this book describes the writing process and addresses the kinds of considerations of which administrators should be aware. Chapters in the book discuss (1) the composing process and the teaching of writing, (2) evaluating…

Because student-teacher conferences appear to be more effective than other methods of writing evaluation, a study was conducted to observe how students' writing changed over a semester and whether those changes were related to the conversations in student-teacher conferences. Two college freshman composition students--one strong and one weak…

The six articles in this journal issue deal with teachers intervening in the writing process (what happens before the student turns in a paper for a grade). The articles focus on the following topics: (1) some objectives and classroom practices for teaching the composing process; (2) a composing profile and a system for developing a student…

The use of small instructional groups can make several contributions to college writing courses. First, small group instruction is participatory, it provides helpful feedback, and it fosters higher levels of cognition. There is near universal acceptance of the theory that students of all ages learn best when participating actively in their own…

The first section of this paper notes that, out of the frustration they feel in lacking a coherent, definitive system for sequencing language instruction, English teachers sometimes turn to the system of grammar teaching used in the past. It then suggests that the English teaching profession is moving through a Romantic age toward a new Classical…

The findings from a study of five students undertaken to determine how unskilled college writers compose, whether their writing processes can be analyzed in a systematic manner, and what an increased understanding of those processes suggests about the nature of composing and about the manner in which writing is taught are presented in this paper.…

Observation and interviews of the children in two third grade classrooms--one in which children write frequently and learn punctuation skills in context, and one in which children learn punctuation in isolation--suggest that punctuation skills are learned more effectively in context. In interviews the "writers" could explain an average of 8.66…

Visual strategies that involve students in comprehending and writing processes while achieving whole-brain input can strengthen the bond between language and experience. Both the analytical, sequential, left brain hemisphere and the holistic, visual/spatial right brain hemisphere can be stimulated in oral and written expression through the use of…

An exploratory study was conducted to define broadly some indices of student writing development. Student essays prepared by high school seniors and third-year university students outside the classroom were collected for analysis. The essays were drawn from four disciplines--English literature, history, geography, and biology--and represented the…

Although the acts of reading literature and writing are closely linked, literature study and composition instruction remain distinct pursuits within college English departments. Style seems to be an interest that unifies the two pursuits. The most common view of style equates it with acceptable rhetorical and grammatical conventions. A second view…

This booklet offers teachers of mainstreamed educationally disadvantaged and learning disabled students some practical strategies for tailoring general writing assignments to meet individual needs. The concept of mainstreaming is discussed in part one, and general strategies for composition teachers are listed in part two. Part three describes 13…

This booklet is one of a series of teacher-written curriculum publications launched by the Bay Area Writing Project, each focusing on a different aspect of the teaching of composition. The first part of the booklet describes a college writing center and the tutorial teaching that takes place in the center. The second part reports a case study of a…

Eight teachers in two-year and four-year colleges discuss in this book their effective methods of teaching writing based on the process of composing. The articles deal with the following topics: (1) the constant interaction of collecting, connecting, writing, and reading in the process of making meaning on paper; (2) the integration of prose…

The relationship between writing and reading processes can be analyzed from several contextual perspectives. The contextual perspectives may be linguistic, social, schematic, or strategic. While the writer follows several steps in getting meaning into print, the reader may not be able to reverse perfectly these steps and get meaning from print.…