Claims students can become better readers and writers by acquiring knowledge of the structure of the English language and developing skill in using the language. Discusses strategies for helping students to recognize five sentence patterns, and learn how to expand sentences. (NH)

Describes and discusses six recent books for teachers that illuminate, from different perspectives, aspects of the reading-writing connection for struggling readers, and how to teach reading and writing effectively. (SR)

Describes theoretical concerns about providing written teacher feedback on mid-drafts of compositions in English-as-Foreign-Language process writing. (Author/VWL)

Administers 23 psychometric measures of reading, writing, and related language processes to 102 elementary students and their parents. Notes results are consistent with claim of functional systems theory that the same language processes are orchestrated flexibly depending on task at hand. Finds number of language deficits uniquely predicted…

Whereas there has been strong advocacy of the value of writing for learning in science, the role of student planning in this approach and the relationships between planning, writing, and learning have been underresearched. Our mixed method study aimed to address this issue by seeking to identify quantitative differences in learning outcomes…

This exploratory study investigated the effects of a structured writing strategy on the quality of expository compositions produced by 36 African-American college undergraduates with learning disabilities. The strategy was structured to assist students in developing a topic sentence and main ideas into body paragraphs, and in using transition…

While recent studies have demonstrated the importance of material structures in shaping writers' roles and practices in academic settings, relatively little attention has been focused on temporality, which exists as an embedded aspect of all such structures. Using the perspectives on temporality articulated in Anthony Giddens' concept of…

All humans use objects in their environment as tools for actions. Some tools are more useful than others for certain people and populations. This paper describes how different first-graders used handheld computers as tools when writing. While all 17 children in the observed classroom were competent users of their handheld computers, their use of…

We studied children's conceptions of the writing process while the complex cognitive activity of writing is carried out through a pictorial representation of the writing process. Sixty children attending Kindergarten, first grade and fourth grade in Bariloche, Argentina, were presented individually with a sequence of four questions about the…

Learning through writing is a way of learning not only the appropriate written expression of disciplinary knowledge, but also the knowledge itself through reflection and revision. This study investigates the quality of a writing experience provided to university students in a first-year biology subject. The writing instruction methodology used is…

In this article, the author interviews Minfong Ho, an award-winning Thai writer of children's and young adult novels. Ho was born in Burma to Chinese parents in 1951, raised in Singapore and Thailand, educated in Bangkok, Taiwan, and at Cornell University in New York. Ho's first novel, "Sing to the Dawn," won first prize from the Council of…

The author describes his approach to retelling Arthurian legends, where he wrote two stories in tandem: one a historical novel in which a boy, eager to serve as a squire and to go on crusade, is given a piece of obsidian, the other of stories, the Arthurian legends, that this boy sees in the obsidian. These became a trilogy. He states that while…

Many early childhood educators and directors want to write, but are overwhelmed by the process and lack confidence in their writing abilities. In this article, the author presents three steps that ensures writers achieve their stated purpose, communicate their ideas in the clearest way possible, and present a professional product. The author…

Although writing instructors have a clear picture of how well our students can write by the end of a composition course, very rarely do we learn how well the students carry over the skills and strategies we teach them to the essays they write for other courses. I collected essays from other courses to determine how effectively students transfer…

Lexical access and retrieval are essential processes in fluent and efficient second language (L2) oral and written productive uses of language. In the case of L2 writing, attention to vocabulary is of paramount importance, although the retrieval of relevant lexis while composing in an L2 frequently entails different degrees of problem-solving…