Describes a study in which nine-year-old children wrote persuasive letters to two individuals and then participated in an oral task designed to determine their competence in listener adapted communication. (FL)

Questions what is going on in the highest reaches of English composition research and the distance between theories of the composition process and actual classroom practice. (CRH)

Presents the results of an investigation of the cognitive and grammatical activities carried out by beginning and advanced college students during pauses in their writing. (HOD)

Describes the methodology and results of a survey of technical writing teachers. Respondents indicated whether their institutions offer a course in lower division technical writing and how they believe such a course should be taught. They also rated the appropriateness of various types of writing exercises. (HTH)

Reports on the application of six criteria to determine writing ability among secondary school students. Offers suggestions for instructing a class of students with wide variations in writing skill. (MM)

Provides, in chart form, the responses given by 13 composition instructors to a survey eliciting their choices for the books, journals, and articles they considered "must reads" for new teachers in the field. Contains short biographical sketches of each respondent. (FL)

Describes the apathy that students exhibit in college freshman composition courses and decries the research jargon currently applied to the teaching of writing. (AEA)

This paper addresses the issue of literacy among secondary school students. Increasing secondary school students awareness of the structure of fables could help them improve their narrative writing competence in English. In a control and experimental group design, the researcher carried out an intervention where the experimental group received…

The research exploring children's perspectives on interactive writing versus independent writing was examined. Studies were analyzed to determine the perspectives of students toward writing when they experienced an interactive writing event and when they did not share this experience. Since interactive writing is a collaborative group writing…

Educators continue to seek ways to foster writing that produces rich language usage by students. Journal writing in the classroom allows students to express ideas in written form. Two types of journal writing often used by educators include topical journal writing and free choice journal writing. The desire to excel in the area of writing prompted…

Metaphors such as "gypsy academics,""freeway flyers," and "contingent laborers," ascribed by compositionists to their work and its conditions, comment on the low status of composition specialists and teachers in academic hierarchies. Work is the activity around which a profession forms, and, as such, it produces…

"Writing the Community: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in Composition" (1997, Adler-Kassner, et. al.) begins with calling the inclusion of service-learning curricula into college-level composition a "microrevolution" rather than a trend. However, a review of the service-learning composition literature illustrates that…

This report describes a program for advancing written expression skills in the primary grades. Extensive research over the past years has shown that an emphasis on mechanics and conventions inhibits the process of writing in primary students. The targeted population consisted of first and second grade students in a middle class community, located…

Research suggests that basic writers are willing to edit but reluctant to revise their writing. In other words, they make surface-level changes to grammar, spelling, and punctuation but tend not to re-conceive content, structure, style, and cohesion. This paper argues that we need more instructional strategies that will help students understand…

The data gathered for this study does not support the hypothesis that second grade students, when they write, do not borrow characters, settings, elements of a story, authors' styles and information from nonfictional literature. Students writings were studied to determine the extent of the borrowing, and to answer the questions: (1) Did the…