Describes children's writing development, examines several general findings from recent research, and provides some examples of how these findings affect classroom practice for English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) bilingual programs. Emphasizes the use and acquisition of writing as a means of facilitating the development of a second language. (MDM)

Teachers can encourage their elementary students to write by demonstrating writing themselves frequently throughout the day. The paper discusses how teachers can become more comfortable with their own writing in order to use it to teach, then offers suggestions on how to write in class and share it with students. (SM)

Presents strategies to help elementary students be more confident and prepared and score higher on standardized tests. The strategies involve briefly reviewing sample tests to familiarize students with common test formats, then focusing on strategies built into their reading, writing, math, science, and social studies plans. (SM)

Discusses the use of electronic communication networks in education to foster literacy development and considers how innovations are introduced and accepted. Describes electronic communication networks in a college classroom used on a local area network to improve students' abilities to write, read, and engage in collaborative problem solving…

Discusses the productivity and work days of white collar workers. Topics include productivity improvement; task analysis; the amount of time spent reading, and how to reduce it by improving writing skills; time spent in meetings; empowered time management; and sustaining a climate for change. (LRW)

This study was originally constructed to examine effect of content-area reading on English-as-a-Second-Language writing proficiency but was restructured and extended because composition topics proved to be confounding factors. Although results of the study raise several issues, most significant are the influence of topic on the acquisition of ESL…

Examined literacy development and enhancement, and level of child interest and involvement in preschools. Found that, although many preschools were fostering the growth of literacy in numerous ways through the environment, materials provided, and activities implemented, many missed opportunities to foster growth and interest in emergent reading…

Describes one teacher's approach to process writing, a mainstay for Montessori adolescent classrooms. The premise of the method is that everyone has the natural potential to write and that the emergence of the inner voice must be nurtured by extended conferencing and revision combined with taking risks, experimenting, and continually revising.…

The Alabama Reading Initiative is a public-private consortium promoting a research-based approach to literacy instruction. Its goal is 100-percent literacy. Use of the approach at one middle school involved development-, practice-, and demonstration-oriented professional development and deep faculty collaboration. The effort resulted in a dramatic…

Discusses changes in society that have led to literacy skills being a criterion for employment. Topics include reading; communication skills; writing; cognitive processes; math; computers, the Internet, and the information revolution; information needs and access; information cross-linking; information literacy; and hardware and software use. (LRW)

When the author and her teaching colleague assessed their 7th and 8th grade students' research papers, they realized that although the papers demonstrated proper structure, the students had not gained meaningful understanding of their topics. Although the teachers had carefully prepared students to write, they had not ensured that students had…

Students are often asked to write reports for science, history, and other content-area classes. Struggling writers and many of their classmates are unsure about how to plan and write reports. This article presents a strategy for planning and writing reports and describes how a general and special education teacher team-taught this strategy to a…

Curriculum-based measures have been validated for use in evaluating reading, mathematics, and writing skills (Marston, 1989). Despite its common use by school psychologists (Wilson & Reschly, 1996), the relationship between the Woodcock Johnson-Revised and curriculum-based measures of writing has not been evaluated. This study investigated the…

Although peer reviewing of writing is a way to create more writing opportunities in college and university settings, the validity and reliability of peer-generated grades are a major concern. This study investigated the validity and reliability of peer-generated writing grades of 708 students across sixteen different courses from four universities…

Over the last 15 years, surveys in a range of English-speaking countries, from North America and the United Kingdom, to New Zealand and Australia, have consistently shown that employers rank oral and written communication skills as highly as or more highly than any technical or quantitative skills. However, in New Zealand there has been very…