Observes, for a school year, a first grader's spontaneous utterances and actions while composing. Identifies seven shifts in the composing process, and identifies four factors that influenced these shifts. Suggests that during the transitional period, a child's ownership of the process is set in a complex relationship with the teacher and peers,…

Examines interactive writing, an innovative approach to early writing instruction. Documents the concepts about print and writing strategies that a Title I reading teacher taught her first grade students across the school year. Indicates that interactive writing provides many opportunities to teach critical and fundamental literacy concepts.…

Examines the online communications behavior of students with high degrees of writing apprehension as they communicated with both familiar and unknown audiences via Internet newsgroups. Finds that low-apprehensive writers tend to exhibit similar communication strategies in both types of newsgroups, but high-apprehensive writers contributed more and…

Claims a consumerism model manifests itself in first-year composition programs. Discusses the academic situation generally and English Departments specifically to explore how the current reform movement clashes with postmodern values in this discipline. (NH)

Discusses how a writing/design (service learning) assignment in a technical writing class offered an opportunity to investigate differences and similarities in evaluation criteria between the classroom (instructors) and the workplace (clients outside academe). Finds considerable overlap between what instructors and clients emphasized, and large…

This cross-sectional study drew on verbal protocol data to analyze the purported problem-solving nature of formulation processes. More precisely, our aim was to explore the allocation of composing time to problem-solving formulation processes in relation to 2 independent variables: (a) the language of composition (i.e., native language [L1] vs.…

As reading and writing are both language processes, one can assume relationships between them, but the exact nature of these relationships has not yet been determined. While a large body of research has addressed reading comprehension and written production independently, very little investigation has examined the possible relationships between…

Much of the writing research on generation 1.5 students has focused on college students in educational contexts, especially either freshman composition or college ESL writing classes. Relatively little is known about them in K-12 settings, especially high-school students, despite their growing presence in these settings. In addition, there is a…

For teacher educators, genre-based pedagogies offer a valuable resource for assisting both pre- and in-service writing instructors to assist their students to produce effective and relevant texts. Instead of focusing on the process of composition, the content of texts, or the abstract prescriptions of disembodied grammars, genre pedagogies enable…

After defining whole language as a philosophy of literacy instruction based on the concept that students need to experience language as an integrated whole, this ERIC "FAST Bib" presents an annotated list of 35 ERIC documents and journal articles consisting of critiques of and responses to the whole language approach in the elementary school. The…

Contrary to the beliefs of many, right-handedness is not a single factor existing in almost all people, with a few exceptions termed left-handed: neither extreme exists independently of the other. During the first 4 years of life there is a period of fluctuation between right and left-handed dominance. Statistics and findings vary in determining…

Despite the agreed-upon success of writing across the curriculum (WAC) programs among those who administer and teach them, there remains a paucity of hard evidence proving that they work. Most published articles touting the success of writing across the curriculum programs cite only anecdotal or soft evidence--not the kind of evidence that would…

A case study questioned essentialist feminist assumptions about the marginalization of females in technical writing courses. A student team composed of a female (Jane, the team leader) and three males enrolled in an advanced writing course required of juniors and seniors majoring in the applied sciences to investigate solutions to the student…

A study examined college students' responses to writing tasks that were created by their instructors--writing tasks that constituted an important part of the instructors' course designs and that were presented to students as an integral part of the curriculum. In all, approximately 4800 independent evaluations of 796 essays were analyzed. The…

A study elaborated on the results of previous research on the effectiveness of the R-WISE (Reading and Writing in a Supportive Environment) software by examining the effects of the student factor of learner-control and the environmental factor of the teacher's preferred instructional style on student writing performance. R-WISE includes 3 specific…