A case study, designed to provide information on what it is that cognitively and socially defines an underprepared student as underprepared, focuses on a piece of writing by a community college student from the inner city (Tanya) in a college-level basic reading and writing course. The study presents a "snapshot" of some of the social…

A study of discourse synthesis (readers/writers composing new texts by selecting, organizing, and connecting content from source texts) examined the performance of accomplished and less accomplished readers in the 6th, 8th, and 10th grades on a report-writing task. Over a 3-day period 60 English/language arts students wrote informational reports…

Intended for curriculum directors, English or language arts chairpeople, and administrators, this book is designed to illuminate the common beliefs and procedures of the National Writing Project, which have been developed with the support of Title IV-C of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and state and local resources, by offering a…

Articles in this journal issue focus on aspects of writing instruction and research. The articles discuss the following topics: (1) recent changes in the teaching of composition, (2) a writing sequence for the junior high/middle and secondary school English curriculum, (3) 10 writing-for-learning tasks to use throughout the curriculum, (4) writing…

As evidenced by the increasing awareness of metaphorical thought (and other nonlinear and aesthetic thinking structures) in literature on the development of composing and comprehending skills, teaching metaphor as a mode of thinking is an important function of schooling, especially in the English classroom. It is important that the classroom…

Subjective engagement and cognitive skills are important for various aspects of writing skills. For the work of writing to be efficient, the student must be able to function in both a rhetorical and productive situation, defined in terms of subject, function, and audience. The processes of writing--defined as planning, translating, and reviewing…

To determine the syntactic maturity of eighth grade Canadian students' writing, all the students in four eighth grade classes were asked to write two compositions--one narrative and one argumentative--two weeks apart. The syntactic maturity level of the resulting 81 narrative compositions and 82 written arguments was compared with the syntactic…

The writing across the curriculum program at Michigan Technological University was designed to change teacher and student attitudes about course-assigned writing as well as to change writing practices by means of a series of faculty workshops. After four years, a team of seven faculty members from rhetoric and composition, literature, psychology,…

The designs, procedures, and findings of a number of studies related to the writing processes of elementary school children are reviewed in this paper. The first section of the paper discusses the rationale of the literature review and the search procedures employed, while the second section summarizes the characteristics of the studies examined…

Three experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that a paragraph composed of sentences with identical or closely related topics would be easier to read than one whose sentence topics were only remotely related. The first experiment involved subjective judgments by 131 high school students on the readability of two paragraphs identical in…

An experimental program was undertaken to determine the effects of attitude and reading achievement on writing, to ascertain if intervention could improve writing achievement and attitude, and to predict success in the program on the basis of an attitude inventory that measured need for structure and tolerance of ambiguity. Subjects were 15 boys…

Three workshops conducted by consultants will help faculty members at Midway College in Lexington, Kentucky, incorporate effective writing instruction in the content areas. The first workshop will stress the importance of reading and writing to the learning process and provide concrete exercises that demonstrate how writing can be used to generate…

To teach creative writing effectively, teachers must be writers themselves and be willing to pass on their tricks of the trade to students. Conducted to determine what structures existed to help teachers pass on their skills, a survey of creative writing in high schools in the Chicago suburban area revealed a continuum, with only one school having…

A study investigated the effects of two methods of teaching college level composition on writing development and, secondarily, the effects the two methods had on overall improvement by gender. The treatment method involved the same syllabus, texts, assignments, and workshop approach as the control method, with the exception of the independent…

Offered as an introductory guide to teachers interested in approaching written English as a "second dialect" that students must master, this review covers quantitative investigations of written language. The first section deals with developmental studies, describing how a variety of researchers have related written structure to writer maturity.…