Intended for practitioners, this book presents a curricular framework for classroom reading and writing experiences that help students understand how reading and writing relate to reasoning and learning. The two sections of the book are organized around three major components of curriculum and how each component was realized in three Indiana…

Arguing that the use of peer groups in a writing classroom theoretically supports the goals of the paradigm shift from emphasis on written product to writing process that has occurred in recent years, this paper examines the complexities confronting teachers who attempt to use groups for instructional purposes. Following a brief introduction, the…

A study was conducted in which word processing and voice synthesis were used to teach beginning writing skills to kindergarten and first grade students. Subjects, 46 children from two elementary schools enrolled in an early education summer school class in writing, were randomly divided into three groups. One group was taught writing using a…

Research and observation have indicated that there is a connection between reading and writing. This connection has been confirmed through the research of D. Graves, L. Calkins, G. Bissex, and M. Baghban. Cognitive theorists believe that reading and writing involve similar schema or structures. Much of the pedagogy and research suggest that the…

The cognitivist view of composition suggests that if students are supplied with a set of writing strategies, they will learn to think in more complex and powerful ways, observing their own ideas and writing from another person's viewpoint. On the other hand, some social critics argue that composition teachers need to help their students enter into…

Observations of a 12-year-old boy provide an in-depth look at the writing of a successful adolescent writer, as it developed over a 2-year period. The subject was interviewed once a week in his home. In addition to the information obtained in interviews, his texts were analyzed for formal features. Three factors emerged as particularly…

A southwestern university sponsored a two-week, half-day summer institute designed to help teachers become aware of recent writing research and implement writing within their classrooms based on the research findings. During the first week, teachers were encouraged to pay more attention to the communication perspective with less attention on…

Intended to help school personnel develop and implement a comprehensive, articulated writing program at the district, building, and classroom levels, this manual emphasizes writing as a composing process, describes the stages of the writing process, and outlines the composing skills expected of students in kindergarten through twelfth grade. In…

Since engineering graduates and other technical students are frequently expected to document their projects as well as present such material orally, a Speech and Technical Writing course was designed at a New Hampshire college to prepare students for both technical writing tasks and oral presentations of their material. The course provides an…

Focusing on the teacher in the problems basic writers experience, a study analyzed the written interaction between a teacher and basic writers, culled from a larger ethnographic study of one freshman composition class. The purpose was to characterize the mode of discourse within a communicative exchange called "theme-ing," which begins…

Literacy should be viewed as the ability to enlist a repertoire of discourse forms to explore and extend thinking and learning. In this view of literacy and literacy learning, various forms of reading and writing are seen as distinct ways of knowing and acquiring knowledge for ones' own purposes. Supporting this view of literacy are theoretical…

One of a series of Parallel Alternative Strategies for Students (PASS) packages developed to provide Florida teachers with modified approaches for presenting content courses to mainstreamed exceptional students, this guide was designed as a supplementary text and workbook for a high school English course. The guide is divided into eight units of…

A proposal for a term paper writing course associated with a content area course is presented in this paper. The paper outlines the proposed course, in which a content area teacher assigns a term paper and has control over appropriate subjects for the students' papers. The paper explains that the course provides help in library research…

Critical thinking skills were taught to students in a lower-track freshman English class through the use of cross-disciplinary subject matter. Given a set of three transmission electron micrographs, or photographs of magnified tissue used in histology and pathology, students were asked to support their conclusions on which two of micrographs A, B,…

When students do not write well in stressful situations, traditional instruction such as grammar exercises, sentence combining, and imitation of sentences will not be especially useful. Students are not often aware of their linguistic insecurity or of how insecurity affects language usage. The writing lab, however, creates an ideal setting for…