Divided into a major kindergarten to second grade section and a smaller primary school section, this book uses the comments of the elementary school teachers involved to describe the St. George (Australia) Writing Project's conference approach to teaching writing. Following a brief description of this approach as featuring adequate daily practice…

Designed to use recent research on revision activities and personal error analysis, a classroom study compared grades on papers written by students with and without specific instruction and practice in revising and proofreading techniques. Detailed statistical analyses of two writing assignments revealed no significant difference in grade…

Researchers in the field of emergent literacy have been watching young children and find that they have a natural interest in print. Many researchers have documented stages of writing and spelling and have illustrated that children can learn to read and write as naturally as they can learn to speak, given an appropriate print environment. Writing…

The Writing-Aid and Author's Helper (WANDAH) computer writing system, funded by the Utah State Office of Education Productivity Program, was used successfully in the Logan High School in the 1984-85 school year. Seven additional project were funded to replicate the Logan project throughout Utah during 1985-86. The main objective of the projects…

Specifically intended to address the teaching of spelling, this description of an elementary school program in Australia deals with many of the pedagogical problems that arise in whole language classrooms, and suggests ways for teachers to integrate a process approach to spelling with process writing to create a total language program. Following…

To evaluate composition programs based on peer feedback, a study compared the improvement in written composition skills of two sets of eighth grade students in 11 classes at eight Dutch schools. The control group was enrolled in teacher feedback programs, the experimental group was enrolled in peer feedback programs. Students wrote a discursive…

A practicum was designed to change the traditional methods of writing instruction which had not been effective in meeting the developmental needs of first-grade children. Twenty-two teachers responded to two surveys to provide problem documentation data. Four goals and instructional plans were selected to address the problem. The first goal, of…

Providing a mix of theoretical and practical suggestions, the articles in this focused journal issue present strategies for teaching various aspects of creative writing. The articles included and their authors are as follows: (1) "What Are We Up To?" (K. Stein); (2) "And Now a Word from Molly and Ned" (M. Martone); (3) "Student Fiction Writers and…

A study examined the effects of using a microcomputer for writing on the composing processes and attitudes toward writing of three non-native college students. The subjects were a Korean, an Egyptian, and a Pole, former students of remedial writing in English as a second language (ESL). The data used included multiple drafts from a previous…

A writing assessment study was conducted in the Fort Worth Independent School District (Texas) in the spring of 1986 as part of a larger program evaluation study of the Writing to Read (WTR) Program. WTR is a computer-based instructional system designed to develop the writing and reading skills of kindergarten and first-grade students. Two types…

A study examined the impact of oral language competence on the writing behavior of secondary students of English as a second language (ESL). Samples of student writing in both the native Spanish and English were analyzed along five dimensions (topic of the composition, internal organization of thoughts, conveying meaning, sentence construction,…

The "informal process" for writing reports, which incorporates the mechanics of textbook theory but emphasizes the composition process, may be more successful for teaching fifth graders how to write reports than the traditional approach. This process recommends a number of nontraditional teaching methods. Student choice of topic should…

To determine students' metacognitive knowledge of the expository writing process, a study analyzed fifth and sixth graders' declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge by means of group questionnaires and individual interviews at all stages of their participation in one of three year-long writing programs. The programs emphasized social…

Current literature on writing instruction focuses on the writing conference, which accompanies a shift in emphasis from product to process and potentially transforms the teacher's role from task master and evaluator to respondent, opening the door to greater peer interaction in literacy learning. However desirable this ideal may be, extant…

This study was designed to describe the signs that influence the literacy learning activities of kindergarten children as expressed in their writing performances and processes. A naturalistic inquiry was made of 24 kindergarten children to determine (1) observable differences in children's writing performances according to developmental…