In this article, the authors describe the development of a pilot project called Writing Zones 12.5. Writing Zones 12.5 was created to help students find strategies for solving writing problems and help them become better writers at every stage of the writing process. The project touches on five of the nine principles that Center for Higher…

When asked to reflect on their experiences with writing, preservice teachers attributed their successes and failures to a number of factors. Some of these attributions, such as those made to "effort" and "ability", were internal in nature. However, the most frequently occurring references were to an external factor: "influential others."…

Through journal writing children have the opportunity to explore learning, feelings, experiences and language. It is a very effective means of helping students develop writing skills through a process approach. Here is a framework for exploring the possibility of including a journal writing program in an elementary school curriculum: (1) consider…

Most children's books are filled with pictures, yet when schools design curricula to teach writing, they often ignore the role of visual images in the writing process. Historically, methods for teaching writing have focused on text. Even relatively recent techniques like brainstorming and story webbing still focus on verbal information. In some…

An unconventional writing activity like correspondence between students can, under favorable social circumstances, encourage some college composition students to discover and employ literate, or decontextualized, writing strategies. The African American student will often write, to borrow James Britton's terms, from the standpoint of the…

High school students in Venezuela study English grammar and vocabulary for 5 years, but, because theirs is an oral culture, they do very little reading or writing either in their native language or in English. When students reach the university and begin to study composition, they are unmotivated to write essays on teacher assigned topics for a…

A study examined whether Kentucky primary teachers were adopting the changes in literacy instruction recommended in the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA/1990) which, in part, encouraged the use of whole language and integrated reading/language arts approaches and the teaching of writing as a process. The study employed direct classroom…

Noting that primary-school writers are imaginative, and that their writing often reflects a mixture of creative, highly individual styles, this book places teaching ideas and students' writing and drawings in perspective and views the experimentations and playfulness of students as ways of learning. The Six-Trait Analytical Model for Assessing…

Sentence combining--a technique of putting strings of sentence kernels together in a variety of ways so that completed sentences possess greater syntactic maturity--is a method offering much promise in the teaching of writing and composition. The purpose of this document is to provide a literature review of this procedure. After defining the term…

A project developed a program for improving writing readiness skills. The targeted population consisted of 37 kindergarten students in an upper middle class southwest Chicago (Illinois) suburb. The need for writing readiness skills was documented through writing observation checklists, anecdotal records, writing portfolios, and diagnostic tests.…

Second language learners need to be given tools with which they can make language learning a personal experience. In writing, this means that they are given the skills needed to collect, organize, and present information that stimulates acquisition of new vocabulary and production of authentic writing that encourages language-related risk-taking.…

An English 812 class in expository writing at Georgia State University was restructured by the instructor to become a seminar in academic publishing. Often, lengthy assignments are assigned in graduate seminar courses, with professors incorrectly assuming that graduate students already have knowledge of the writing process, when they often do not.…

This book is addressed to those about to embark on the teaching of second language writing as well as to those already engaged in the field. Teachers are dedicated to postering growth in writing; researchers want to investigate the questions that shed the greatest light on the problem in the field. The concerns of both these groups are addressed…

In this collection, English language arts teachers describe methods they use to increase their students' interest in and appreciation of writing. The book focuses on the benefits of using portfolios in assessing student writing and incorporation of the revision process into writing. The 16 essays drawn from the elementary, secondary, and, college…

An English teacher at Hokkaido International School, Japan, guided his students through the writing process of thinking up ideas for writing topics and developing and revising those ideas into competent works. The class was composed of seven non-native speakers (in grades nine through twelve) who tried to achieve fluency in English within the…