Studies revision skills of grades 5-6 students asked to improve expository text written by other students by giving explicit evaluations, diagnoses, and suggestions. Supplements quantitative data with qualitative analysis of revision activities. Specifies in the model important cognitive steps in revision: compare, diagnose, and operate. Concludes…

Presents a case study of a first-grader who began to articulate a literary voice through her appropriation of narrative form. Focuses on her active response as she made narrative discourses her own. Draws on the work of L. Vygotsky and M. Bakhtin to suggest a way of talking about how young writers construct themselves. (SR)

Examines phonological transfer in developmental student writing (spelling or word configurations that represent what the writer hears). Examines two discourse features--"by strings" and "topic/comment" sentence structures. Analyzes a developmental writing African American student's essay, demonstrating the power and tension in…

Considers two competing accounts of how writers construct meaning, the designative tradition (which holds that speech artifacts mediate people's thinking) and the expressive tradition (which focuses on the transformation of inner speech to public speech). Show how one student's writing experiences reveal the interrelated roles of these two…

Compares writing products of first graders who were taught to write using a structured approach (including phonemic awareness and phonics training) to the products of students taught using a holistic approach. Finds that children in the structured program wrote more words, wrote better overall compositions, and spelled more words and different…

Offers a rationale for applying the principle of nonjudgmental awareness to the English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) writing class. Presents data demonstrating that a nonjudgmental, expression-oriented approach to ESL writing results in higher student pass rates than does a judgmental, error-oriented approach. (TB)

Examines the development and implementation of a communication component of the general education curriculum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Describes the model as incorporating a decentralized approach to teaching speech and writing. Details organizational and practical issues surrounding this major change in the undergraduate general…

Examines the effectiveness of the Direct Instruction program "Reasoning and Writing" in improving the writing and reasoning abilities of gifted fifth-grade students. Notes significant improvement in writing skills of students using "Reasoning and Writing," yet no significant difference in reasoning skills. Provides implications…

Explores correlates of college writing students' use of instructor comments. Considers interrelationships among writing apprehension, writing outcomes expectations, writing self-efficacy beliefs, and students' use of global and local feedback from instructors when students revise first drafts of news stories. Finds that writing apprehension, the…

Explores the effects of "Collaborative Writer" software on students' collaborative writing processes and attitudes. Finds that this approach helps students develop equitable divisions of labor, subtly supervise their peers, share ill-formed information, and coordinate writing that is continually evolving. (RS)

Investigates the effectiveness of an integrated communication arts approach (emphasizing writing) on sixth graders' comprehension of a world history topic. Finds that students who completed writing tasks after brainstorming generated significantly higher quality ideas and improved their writing ability more than students who completed short-answer…

Reviews literature on freewriting, personal writing, and the at-risk secondary student. Argues that personal writing, imaginative writing, and freewriting are vehicles for self-expression, discovery, and evaluation of at-risk students' lives. (RS)

Examines the qualities and frequency of episodes of concurrent metalinguistic and ideational thinking reported verbally by second-language learners while they composed. Finds frequencies of thinking episodes is significantly related to learners' writing expertise in their mother tongue. Argues for integrating the notion of comprehensible output…

Provides an annotated list, organized by subject, of 151 books in the areas of writing (contexts, status surveys, instruction, processes, text analysis, assessment, rhetoric, and writing and learning), language (processing, development, interrelationships, and language and schooling), literature, and teacher education. (MG)

Contrasts social constructionist and social interactionist approaches to the problem of discourse. Examines recent social interactionist studies concerning the effects of readers on writers' development, including investigations of word-segmentation skills, peer conferencing, and instructional discourse. (MG)