Explains how Rudolf Flesch writes for elementary school children and recommends having a hero to maintain a point of view using a dialogue method or controversial writing, avoiding using heavy words, and having a strong beginning and ending. (YDS)

The fundamental goal of literacy is to construct meaning from language. Teachers help students become literate by providing opportunities to listen to read-alouds, by persuading them to investigate their writing process, by discussing what they have heard and read, and through other activities designed to attract students to the world of words.…

An English writing teacher has helped students acquire control over their writing in varying contexts by focusing on specific strategies that they could apply to different strategies of the writing process. Strategies for inquiry, for drafting and for products can be used with any of the students' writing tasks, which helps them become strategic…

The author of this article states that, as a fiction writer, he is reluctant to discuss process, yet, at war with a mystical stance about writing fiction, is the belief he imparts to his students that writing is a craft that can be taught, mastered, and understood. This article describes the seemingly subconscious approach to the writing of "The…

Experiential learning is a time-honored approach that can help to "...seal the bond between the learner and the learned." Such learning encourages the making of meaning from individual and shared experiences and helps abstract concepts to become relevant to the learner. The 20th century educational theorist, John Dewey, articulated a…

This article presents a profile of Newbery Award-winning author Karen Hesse, who is best known for her knack for recovering the little-known stories of the past and making them resonate once again in her books. As a meticulous researcher and lover of things from the past, some of Karen Hesse's most well-loved stories have tugged at her sleeve (and…

Much of Debra Matthews' teaching experience has been with apprehensive writers, and while teaching freshman English to primarily nontraditional students, she found that the students were often nervous about the writing process. The students acknowledged that they felt threatened by the evaluation process, and some were intimidated by the writing…

What does it mean to take a writerly approach to research? Sondra Perl and her co-authors have pondered this question over the past five years as they have each worked with her to design and draft dissertations that combine their work as literacy researchers with their love of writing. Each of them has moved toward storytelling as a compelling and…

Novice researchers are expected to participate through writing in the particular discourse community in which their research is located, yet if they come from other languages and other academic cultures and traditions than those of the education provider, they may experience the process of writing as the process of silencing their voices. Many…

This article discusses the work of Lucy McCormick Calkins, an educator and the visionary founding director of Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Begun in 1981, the think tank and teacher training institute has since trained hundreds of thousands of educators across the country. Calkins is one of the original architects of the…

Only a few instances of empirical research examine what the students themselves think of their participation in peer review. Perhaps because peer response is practically instinctive to those who teach writing, few have felt the need to study the student perspective. Instead, studies have focused on the quality of peer comments, their effect on the…

A writing process of five stages, setting the topic and goals, planning the outline, organising the structure, building the content, and reviewing, is proposed to guide hypermedia authoring. To explore the effects of the system designed with writing-process guidance, this study enrolled 108 seventh graders at a junior high school as experimental…

Many culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) struggle with the writing process. Particularly, they have difficulties developing and expanding ideas, organizing and elaborating sentences, and revising and editing their compositions (Graham, Harris, & Larsen, 2001; Myles, 2002). Computer graphic…

This study examined the writing development of English language learners (ELLs) in a fourth-grade bilingual classroom in Northern California. The purpose of this study was to explore the linguistic and cultural resources the students used to inform their writing and determine to what extent, if any, these resources influenced their writing. The…

Peer-response remains a central process in first-year composition; faculty can make it effective and efficient by "spotlighting"--designing the process as digital, emergent, and distributive. In this article, the author first elaborates on his own use of peer-response terminology. He favors "peer-response" as the descriptive term for…