Three high school students present findings of their survey of professional writers' training, influences, and writing processes conducted to judge whether secondary school writing programs adequately prepare high schoolers for writing in the future. Comments from writers emphasized prewriting, inspiration, reader feedback, and sequential drafts.…

Describes a student ethnography project designed to explore contrastive rhetoric, and help ESL and native language speakers become more conscious, proficient participants in academic discourse. The project was designed to let the teacher and the students play the roles of participants and observers. (RS)

Assesses students' responses to and production of story conventions in detective or mystery stories and explores students' responses to literature as potential connections between comprehending and composing text. (MM)

Draws a number of conclusions from observing children involved in early literacy tasks, including the following: (1) children and teachers live together in schools, but their perceptions of shared world differ; and (2) the teacher, frequently operating from hierarchy model of curriculum, plans activities promoting and assessing literacy skills,…

Digital media has become an increasingly powerful force in modern society. This volume brings together outstanding European, American and Australian research in "writing and digital media" and explores its cognitive, social and cultural implications. In addition to presenting programs of original research by internationally known…

Reports on a survey of English, social studies, and science teachers about perceived and actual classroom writing instruction practices. (RL)

Describes a study on college level remediation, examining how students classified as remedial are cognitively and socially defined. Analyzes a student's writing sample in the context of her past school experiences, future goals, and attitudes towards literacy. (MM)

Reviews research on reading and writing development, comparing the whole-language approach with the Montessori approach for teaching reading and writing at the elementary school level. Also discusses techniques to teach students how to write poetry and short fiction, stressing the importance of both freedom and structure in evolving reading and…

Presents a critical overview of trends in research on writing skills. Defines criteria for the studies based on current cognitive writing models. Includes treatments designed to change writer activity by influencing knowledge and cognitive functions. Discusses acquisition of knowledge or expert skills, interaction with other writers, and computer…

Describes a research project in which 20 potential candidates for remedial programs in junior high school used desktop publishing to design, write, and produce their own magazine. Finds that students wrote as they had never written before, although the transfer of demonstrated skills to test situations was disappointing. (SR)

Describes how a semester-long pen-pal project enabled 18 participating university language arts students, a class of first graders, their teacher, and the university instructors to become co-learners in meaningful, action research. Discusses insights about writing derived from the children's weekly letters. Presents an assessment rubric charting…

Written communication scholarship has shown that successful social change requires discursive stability. This study was designed to investigate how this stability is created. Critical discourse analysis of 30 corporate university articles investigated claims authors made about the expansion of market-based values into contexts of organizational…

As part of a larger project, a ninth-grade class participated in a year-long exchange of writing with students in an inner-city London classroom. The larger project involved 10 San Francisco Bay Area sixth- through ninth-grade classes exchanging writing with nine inner-city London classes and a Swedish class. Students and teachers in each of the…

An action research project addressed the problem of inadequate student knowledge of writing strategies and students' negative attitudes toward the writing process. The targeted population consisted of early childhood, first grade, and third grade students in two growing, lower/middle class communities located in the western suburbs of a large…

At the same time that educators and researchers are identifying ways in which major reform and restructuring is needed in schools, research on student learning in science (and other subjects) from constructivist and conceptual-change perspectives is suggesting the potential for significant improvements in students' understanding of science and…