Intended for teachers in Tasmania, this booklet discusses making sense of language, the nature of written language, language and context, and organizing knowledge of the world. Chapter 1, Understanding Reading, contains a general discussion of the reading process as well as sections on the beginning and continuing reader, planning a reading…

Prepared by classroom teachers, the papers in this collection combine practical knowledge with recent findings from writing research. Among the topics discussed in the 25 papers are (1) student teacher conferences, (2) using poetry to develop writing fluency, (3) writing as a learning process, (4) oral and written discourse, (5) creative dramatics…

Intended as a guide for elementary school teachers who want to use the computer as a writing tool in their classrooms, this booklet offers an outline of practical information and techniques for introducing young children to computers in kindergarten through grade 6. The first chapter explains the process approach to writing and advocates computer…

After placing second in an international school newspaper competition for which they had won first prize seven consecutive years, and discovering that the reasons for the drop included typographical errors and poor printing, the staff of the student newspaper of Danville (Illinois) High School invested in a Macintosh 128K computer. The Macintosh…

Based on studies conducted by teachers and graduate students at Northeastern University, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the kinds of research being conducted by writing teachers, as well as extensive information on how this research has affected their professional lives. The chapters are divided into five parts dealing with the…

Designed for elementary school teachers, this publication treats various aspects of publishing young student-authors' writing. Activities are as follows: (1) proofreading (children should proofread first by themselves); (2) pagination (let children decide how to break up the text); (3) placement of text (on alternate pages, for example, or perhaps…

Research indicates that writing can be an important vehicle for integrating all the learning that occurs in a foreign language. However, a number of factors have conspired to displace foreign language writing as a critical skill: the push for oral proficiency, departmental fragmentation, larger class sizes, and heavier faculty loads. Second…

Working from both literary and composition theory, this book argues that American composition theory and pedagogy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is founded on the Platonic view that invention is a solitary act in which the individual, drawing upon innate knowledge and mental structures, searches for the truth, using introspective self…

The nature of children's communication processes of listening, speaking, reading, and drawing/writing that occur during story time is explored in this paper, which describes story time as a literacy event. The framework that children develop during story-time can serve as a vehicle for language arts instruction. In helping children cultivate…

A case study of a young boy's learning to read and write from the beginnings of literacy at age 5 up to age 11, after reading and writing have converged, is the focus of this book. The first part of the book, a description of his learning to write, discusses invented spelling, research about other young spellers and writers, the shift toward…

Based on emergent literacy research, two components of reading and writing--the morning message and the writing process--were developed in a laboratory school kindergarten by teacher-researcher collaboration and later disseminated to both public and private schools through a project conducted for the Kamehameha Schools, a private school in…

A study focused on how the writer's knowledge of the language and use of a prewriting strategy for planning ideas affect the quality and efficiency of the writing. Three hypotheses were developed about how knowledge and strategy might influence writing performance: (1) independence (predicts that knowledge and strategy will independently improve…

Observing the teaching of revision from the teacher's perspective, a study conducted case studies of three eighth grade language arts teachers who taught writing by a process approach, but who used different instructional techniques, comparing what each teacher believed and said about the revision stage with how she actually taught the process.…

To understand and describe a developmental learning progression of choices students make in forming chains of relationships in their narrative texts, a study used the Cohesive Harmony Index to measure cohesion in children's written narratives. Data were obtained from 36 grade school children at intervals of four months over the students' first…

Three universes of discourse are at work when writers create or use a metaphor: the analogical or metaphorical universe from which they borrow words, things, and relationships (sometimes called the "vehicle"); the contextual universe in which the analogy is being used (sometimes called the "topic"); and the metauniverse, or the comprehensive…