Recommends having students keep a reading journal on reading assignments as a way of getting them involved in reading, thinking, and discussion. (EL)

Describes a sequence of four studies that explored how people composed sentences while writing expository essays. Among the findings were that the sentence composition process was often guided by a writing plan, and the most frequent changes accomplished by revision of parts were word choice, aspect of meaning, and grammatical structure. (HOD)

Describes assignments that integrate ideas from student journals into expository and deliberate essays. (HOD)

Offers a framework for analyzing lexical cohesion in academic discourse based on a previous model for analysis of conversational and literary discourse. Discusses the implications of this new framework for teaching expository reading/writing and for research. (HTH)

Paper presented at an in-service course, Novermber 1970, Reinhardswaldschule (Kassel), West Germany. (WB)

Discusses the results of research that suggest there are two distinct "schools of thought" or predilections that influence teachers' judgments in evaluating compositions. (AEA)

A study was done to investigate the use of graphic organizers to compensate for text that was poorly organized. Results support assimilation encoding theory and suggest that organizers aid recall when readers must reorganize information but are of little value when reorganization is unnecessary. (Author/JN)

Describes the functions, specific uses, syntactic structure, and typographical characteristics of titles, discussing examples from newspapers, books, films, and scientific journals. Analysis of the semantic relationship between title and text is followed by the description of various instructional techniques for the production of titles and the…

The author explains how she taught third- and fourth-graders the skills needed to produce a class newspaper: note-taking, layout, news writing, and proofreading. She found that learning research skills and disciplined newswriting improved students' writing in general. (SJL)

Describes activities used to help students study poems by Seamus Heaney. Includes a transcript of a group discussion of one of the poems; an essay and poems written by a student in response to Heaney's poems; and a commentary on desirable methods for teaching literature to students aged 16 through 19. (GT)

Discusses how to teach a first-year composition course, expository writing, required of most students at Rensselaer Polytechnic. Considers how to motivate students and help them to see connections between writing and their technical work. Offers various techniques for getting the students to write comfortably. (PA)

Examines the in-class essay as written by university freshmen to assess the extent to which students use formulaic expressions to minimize the cognitive burden of generating a coherent and adequate answer. Results show that students made extensive use of formulaic expressions and shaped their answers to reflect the way the information had been…

Describes an expository writing lesson, taught in the context of a modified writing workshop, that motivates needy students to compose meaningful essays. Explains that this approach promotes self-pacing and independent learning. Concludes that this method helps struggling readers see themselves as writers. (PM)

Challenges the assumption that a student's attempts at writing in another language are a product of his primary language background and that a student's native cultural and linguistic background will be limiting. Also challenges the pedagogical implications of this perspective, which views students, particularly those from Asia, as fixed by their…

Examines the effects of various writing tasks (notetaking, answering study questions, and essay writing) on learning, using recall of specific text elements and recall of the theme or gist of expository writing. Finds that students' topic knowledge, passage content structure, and the nature of the task influence students' text comprehension. (MM)