Research has demonstrated differences in the ways in which males and females communicate both in speech and in writing. A study extended previous research on gender differences in written communication to adults. Follow-up questionnaires were mailed to 277 people who had completed teacher preparation programs at the University of Tennessee. There…

A study compared the writing abilities of children in a whole language classroom with those of children involved in a skills-based classroom. Subjects, 37 African-American students in two heterogeneous first-grade classrooms in a low socio-economic area school in the inner-city of a large Alabama city, completed a reading/writing assessment (a…

Recent research creates a better understanding of how writing is best learned, taught, and used for learning in school and life. Research done by Anne Haas Dyson and Carol Stack has indicated that many low-income African American children may bring resources to school that are often overlooked. Matthew Downey moves from Dyson's findings about how…

In writing, as in conversation, there are implicit boundaries which separate various modes of communication, and these boundaries cause exclusion, discomfort, and misunderstanding. The existence of these boundaries results in a number of issues, such as the categorization of texts, the differences between writing for English classes and writing in…

A study investigated the writing of language arts report cards. Eleven elementary teachers from three districts volunteered to compose report cards while thinking aloud. The teachers worked in districts that exerted varying degrees of control over teachers' choice of language arts instructional materials and assessment. Analysis of the 75 report…

To understand literature, it is necessary for a reader to make connections between the text of the literary work and the text of the reader's life. Student autobiographical writing before reading can be used to enhance students' ability to make such connections. Autobiographical writing helps students apply relevant life experience that might not…

The polarity of gender is perhaps the most important shaping force in the nineties in the growth and change of education and educational theory. Many critics have argued that there is a masculine bias at the heart of most academic disciplines and methodologies. Feminist approaches, conversely, are viewed as intuitive, expressive, and unscientific.…

A study investigated why children's drawing becomes less flexible and less exploratory as the children age. Subjects, 92 students in two kindergarten and two first grade classrooms in two different public schools in Queens, New York, were interviewed about their feelings concerning drawing and writing. Each classroom was visited for 1 week each.…

Traditional histories of American college composition instruction in the 19th and 20th centuries examine primarily the textbooks used in those courses, then draw conclusions based on the content of those textbooks about the activities and attitudes expressed in the classroom. The canon of composition historiography is lacking in several ways: the…

A study explored the connection between reading and writing by examining the writing produced by three young readers of action comic books. The subjects were in grades four and five in a British Columbia (Canada) school and were identified by a survey as being avid comic book readers. During three writing sessions, they were asked to produce…

A descriptive study investigated whether a common middle-level writing program exists, and what factors impact the writing program and the relationships among these factors. A random sample of 1,500 classrooms in California and Missouri stratifying on four grade span school types (K-8, 6-8, 7-8, 7-9) was chosen. A survey was developed, sent, and…

A study diagnosed the nature of different text production abilities of Swiss grade 5 and grade 9 students, and of adults, and diagnosed good and poor writers' differences within each of these three age groups. Subjects, 36 in all, were uniformly divided between 11- and 15-year-old students from the Bernese secondary school and high school…

A study traced the discourse control of one writer, over 3 years, from his basic writing course to his junior year "membership" in academia. It reported on the student's transitions in areas of print code control in 28 writing tasks from 6 classes covering 3 disciplines. The analysis involved 38 error patterns, including spelling,…

A study examined whether students who underwent training and gained experience in the use of computer word processing techniques would score significantly higher on a writing test than students who received no such training. Students in two randomly selected English Composition II classes at Gloucester County College (New Jersey) were randomly…

A 1991 survey questioned 61 teachers on the ways they were using collaborative learning to teach composition. Comparisons with a 1988 survey showed that the biggest increase was in the use of collaborative drafting strategies. Increases also occurred in focusing, prewriting, and editing, and there were slight decreases in revision and…