Intended for students taking the English 30 Grade 12 Diploma Examinations in Alberta, Canada, this test booklet contains the composition component of the June 1988 tests. During 2.5 hours, students are required to perform the following writing tasks: (1) a personal response to an excerpt from Annie Dillard's "Teaching a Stone to Talk"…

Designed primarily for use with basal reader instruction, this book describes over fifty reading instruction strategies and practices. The book is divided into the following 11 units: (1) "Lesson Frameworks"; (2) "Comprehension and Content Area Reading Strategies"; (3) "Strategies for Responding to Reading as Writers"; (4) "Text-Based…

This booklet provides samples of student writing that exemplify the standards that governed the scoring of student essays on the June 1988 English 30 Diploma Examination. Both major and minor writing assignments for seven students are provided, with examples of the full range of student writing. Commentaries accompanying the essays highlight…

This booklet provides samples of student writing that exemplify the standards that governed the scoring of student essays on the June 1988 English 33 Diploma Examination. Both major and minor writing assignments for seven students are provided, with examples of the full range of student writing. The English 33, Part A, Written Response requires…

Recounts observations of a child's interactions with Beverly Cleary's Ramona books, noting that she exhibited "passionate attention" toward the characters by becoming involved with them and discussing them often. Shows that the child's comments grew from observations to criticism over time, and her passionate attention to Ramona expanded…

Compares inferences about story characters' behavior, perceptions, and goals made by eighth graders, eleventh graders, college freshmen, and college seniors. Concludes that from early adolescence to young adulthood, readers shift from conceptions of characters in terms of immediate surface feelings and behaviors to conceptions in terms of…

Presents the notion of a "textshop," which juxtaposes methods of teaching reading and writing with psychoanalysis, both of which are approached through Andre Breton's invention of surrealism. (JC)

A comparative study examined student performance attributed to the mode of literature instruction to determine the validity of increasing auditory-based learning activities in the middle school language arts classroom. Two classes of identified low-achieving students in a middle school reading program participated and were alternately assigned to…

Concentrating on the unintentionally dominant group, the author considers how Walter Ong demonstrates that novice writers have a narrow concept of audience that is really a narcissistic fiction projected as an ideal reader (1975). Given this, writing instructors can work to broaden their students' sense of audience to consider readers who are not…

The three books reviewed in this article represent the continuous effort to make visible the significant bridge between theory and practice in the fields of literacy and children's literature. While the authors maintain distinct purposes for their creations, the texts each speak to a strong theoretical support for the practices they describe. The…

Reading evaluation should (1) be a continuous process using many samples of a learner's work, (2) allow students to engage in uninterrupted reading, (3) constitute a learning situation, and (4) indicate new directions for improvement in an open-ended manner. Current practices for evaluating children's reading processes are usually based on samples…

The provincial results of the English 33 Achievement Test administered June 8, 1982, as part of the Student Achievement Testing Program of Alberta Education are presented in this report. Following a list of the requirements of Part A (written expression), the first section describes the categories used to assess total expression and the scoring…

The discussions of 30 participants in a seminar on the present (mid-1980s) state of research in the English language arts are included in this document. Topics of discussions were as follows: (1) interrelating the processes of reading and writing; (2) texts with different structures and different content: implications for teaching comprehension…

Reflecting current practices in the teaching of writing, the exercises in this compilation were drawn from the journal "Exercise Exchange." The articles are arranged into six sections: sources for writing; prewriting; modes for writing; writing and reading; language, mechanics, and style; and revising, responding, and evaluating. Among the topics…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 31 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the reader pragmatics of fiction; (2) readers' choices versus critics' choices in children's literature; (3) nonverbal communication in selected works of…