Teaching poetry and fiction writing is most effective in classes where the student population is heterogeneous. The experienced writers help the beginners improve and the beginners provide a critical audience for the more advanced writers. Diversity in age and worldliness challenges the creative writing instructor to provide the opportunity for…

A computer-assisted analysis was conducted of the capitalization skills taught in nine series of language arts textbooks. The results indicated that while textbook authors generally agreed on the inclusion of certain basic capitalization skills, significant differences existed with regard to introductory levels, grade-level sequencing, the amount…

Designed to enable special needs students to write resumes and complete application forms with employable accuracy, this set of activities on applying for a job is the fourth unit in a nine-unit secondary level careers course intended to provide handicapped students with the knowledge and tools necessary to succeed in the world of work. Chapter 1…

To investigate differences in the writing processes of novice and expert writers, a test of writing skills was developed that required subjects to write a business letter in defense of a particular system of public transportation in response to a letter objecting to that system. In the first of three experiments, significant differences were found…

This paper provides a brief overview of three direct measures of writing assessment--holistic, analytic, and primary trait scoring--and several variations and combinations of the three. It then relates these measures to eight types of educational decisions: (1) diagnosis of individual learner strengths and weaknesses, (2) student placement, (3)…

This paper specifies the assessment of those mechanics skills-handwriting, capitalization, punctuation, formats--that are needed for effective writing by students in grades one through six. An introductory section provides background materials, including explanations of how the skill specifications were selected and how they are presented in the…

One-half-page resumes of a variety of tests applicable to secondary level bilingual education have been compiled here. The following areas are covered, with the number of tests in each area in parentheses: multiple skills (5), writing (2), listening and speaking (5), grammar (4), reading (2), aptitude (3), occupational interest (4), general…

In a study of differences and similarities between children's oral and written stories, 23 third grade pupils wrote stories about a given topic and then, two weeks later, told stories about the same topic. Analysis of the stories revealed five types of narrative structures, of which the most commonly used was a "situation-problem-solution"…

An experiment on relative clause formation involving Cantonese students who were learning English was conducted. The study sought to determine whether sentence combining exercises would help Chinese students construct long relative clauses instead of the short relative clauses that exist in their first language. For the experimental group each…

This volume contains information on a pilot writing program, involving approximately 900 kindergarten through fifth grade students, designed to test the impact of emphasizing written composition during the language arts instructional period only, as compared to emphasizing composition skills during both language arts and social studies/science…

This brief guide is designed to help teachers learn how to integrate content and problem solving skills in the social studies curriculum. Problem-solving skills include analyzing an in-depth question/problem, selecting a format for recording information, gathering and recording information, and writing a summary. Materials in the guide include: a…

Noting that the study of the future has been neglected within the language arts framework, this paper proposes a curriculum unit that uses such study as a vehicle to develop composition skills. The paper provides the following information: the general objectives of the unit; evaluation methods; general humanistic themes to be studied; materials;…

One in a series of ten mini-manuals on office communication proofreading, this booklet for business and office students provides instruction in the use of plurals and possessives. Included are terminal and specific objectives, grammar rules and related information, and tasks for practice. A test over the information presented concludes the manual.…

A remedial-English pilot program for college freshmen yielded four major observations about basic writers: they are poor readers, their level of syntactic maturity is low, their writing is riddled with errors, and the strategies they use in their writing often work against them to compound their difficulties. Among the conclusions drawn from these…

Many students, especially nontraditional ones, are not ready for conventional instruction in composition because their problems with the medium overwhelm the content of their writing. There are two different needs for composition students: composing (content) and editing (correctness), which need to be taught in a two-step process. Composing can…