This paper is an outline of a course unit for a writing laboratory, specifically designed for use in teaching English composition to Mexican-Americans. The unit utilizes a multi-media approach to elaborate the necessary organization of a paragraph contrasting two topics. Goals and objectives are included in the unit outline as is a slide/tape…

Describes research that examines the social and the pedagogical factors responsible for differences in the writing skills of elementary grade students. (AM)

Finds that only 70% of sociology textbook paragraphs contain material important for understanding major textbook concepts, that substantive material is not evenly distributed among chapters in the same book, and suggests students be made aware of this as a reinforcement for the importance of selective reading. (MS)

Argues that the paragraph represents a semantic unit, not just a grammatical convention. Presents original research to establish the types and frequencies of certain paragraph formats found in expository material. Discusses the most appropriate time for teaching students the ideational relationships within paragraphs. (FL)

Because the cumulative nature of paragraphs can be compared to that of a sentence, Indian students who learn how to add words to the end of sentences to make them "richer" and more complex can better understand how to improve their writing at the paragraph level. (DS)

Describes writing assignments in which students develop paragraphs incorporating various sense images. (RL)

The editor of "English Quarterly" interviews Frank O'Hare about his work on sentence combining, his views about writing instruction and writing research, and about his own writing. (RL)

A practicum used an integrated writing approach to improve 28 third-graders' ability to write descriptive paragraphs. The program consisted of two strategies: a process approach and a step-by-step approach. Success was measured by comparing the statistics of a pretest and a posttest and through observation, computer generated worksheets, and…

THE FOLLOWING IS THE FULL TEXT OF THIS DOCUMENT: LEVEL: High school and college. AUTHOR'S COMMENT: I used this mini-unit to initiate the class in working effectively as a peer group. Moreover, the task I assigned demands that students develop an awareness of their audience's needs by providing an immediate and concrete response. THE APPROACH: (1)…

Sentence combining can act as a corrective for the large number of language arts lessons and activities that emphasize errors. Based on familiar sentence patterns, sentence combining provides models of effective language use and encourages students to examine and try more expressive and interesting styles of speaking and writing. Sentence…

In asserting that cohesion both exists in a superordinate relationship to unity and emphasis and must be considered a part of the surface structure of written language as well as the deep structure, this text provides a commentary on the paragraph as the basic unit of written language and an analysis of the structure underlying paragraph…

Helping students understand coherence in terms of the lexical ties and semantic relations possible between clauses and sentences formalizes an area of writing instruction that has been somewhat vague before and makes the process of creating a coherent paragraph less mysterious. Many students do not have the intuitive knowledge base for absorbing…

Algebraic equations and geometric forms are useful in teaching and learning composition. Algebraic equations can illustrate the modular nature of paragraph structures and can be refined by students to describe types of paragraphs. Discussion of the "slippery" nature of words and their power of transformation can be a lecture topic as the class…

A study of 94 students was undertaken in an attempt to support the hypothesis that remedial English instruction in college can result in measurable improvement in student writing. These students, chosen randomly from 376 prospective remedial students were divided into seven different writing classes which met for one-hour class sessions four days…

When students inductively study linguistic patterns and then apply their understanding to achieve sentence variety, their interest in composition is heightened and their writing styles improve. Through examples in music and in nonsense and model sentences, students became aware of their language's basic structural patterns (subject-verb word…