Designed to define the academic writing skills required of beginning undergraduate and graduate students, a survey of needed academic writing skills was completed by faculty in 190 academic departments at 34 American and Canadian universities with high foreign student enrollments. At the graduate level, six academic disciplines with relatively…

A manual of techniques for teaching writing in classes of English as a second language (ESL) encourages composition beyond elementary-level sentence exercises. The objectives include communicating to a reader, expressing ideas without the pressure of face-to-face communication, exploring a subject, recording experiences, and becoming familiar with…

Intended as an introduction to an interactive writing workshop, this paper presents a general description of the Document Design Center's writing model to be used by workshop participants. Suggesting that the model is an aid in analyzing and revising writing, in developing new documents, and in applying writing research to practical writing tasks,…

Research studies have pointed to a similarity between reading and listening that may imply that listening to writing is likely to be a useful means of evaluating it. Therefore a study was designed to determine the extent to which holistic scores assigned to student essays by readers correlate with holistic scores assigned to the same essays by…

The result of five years of collaboration, discussion and applied research, this book reviews theory and research on handwriting instruction for ordinary children as well as giving detailed consideration to the problems encountered by slow learners and children with physical disabilities. The titles of the chapters (and their authors, if different…

This study examined the teaching and learning of writing for secondary school students as it occurred in the interactive context of teacher-student writing conferences in the form of private teacher-student conversations about the students' writing or writing process. Following ethnographic procedures, the study examined naturally occurring…

This digest offers an overview of current research in the ERIC database on methods and measurements for evaluating student writing. The digest considers: (1) methods of response to students' written products; and (2) the measurement of quality as represented by effective classroom teaching methods. (SR)

The instruction of writing research papers to English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) college students is discussed. The challenges facing all students learning to write research papers are noted, including choosing a topic, deciding on a thesis, research and documentation, and the actual writing of the paper. The challenges faced specifically by ESL…

Viewing language as both presentational and representational, or as having both manifest and latent content, can help writing instructors and student writers appreciate its full function and better understand the nature of writing errors. This essential duality of language usage is seen by its functions consisting of unconscious (primary process)…

This report provides information on how Hawaii's students performed on the 1987 and 1988 administrations of the Stanford Writing Assessment (which was adopted as part of Hawaii's Statewide Testing Program). Included in the report are a state summary of the performance of students in grades 3, 6, 8, and 10 and an analysis of the assessment results…

Reading comprehension is much more than a decoding of the printed words on the page; it is, rather, a complex interaction between readers and their personal past experiences as they relate to the text. A connection between the text and past experiences of the readers can stimulate expectations about the text. Facilitating these links presupposes a…

The third in a series on content area writing instruction, this booklet is intended for high school teachers who have taught writing, but who want to move into content writing topics and for teachers who are novices at teaching writing but who think content writing instruction might be an important skill to teach their students. The three sections…

A comprehensive, three-dimensional model of peer tutoring, constructed by gathering current theories and research and locating them on a dynamic continuum of the tutoring process, allows researchers to break new ground in tutor research and might eventually offer a new heuristic for training peer tutors. The first axis in the model, the focus…

Using word processors and the traditional handwriting method, a study investigated the relationship of learning styles to performance in twelfth graders' written compositions. Subjects (n=55) were enrolled in a public school in east central Mississippi. The study hypothesized that students using word processors and those using the traditional…

The Test of Standard Written English (TSWE) is a 50-item multiple choice instrument designed to assess the ability of college students to use English. In this study, based upon a sample of 45 students, the TSWE was revalidated with writing samples. The coefficient of 0.54 was most impressive given that the TSWE scores were restricted to those…