Recall data from eight eleventh-grade students were analyzed to determine the effects of writing tasks on recall of content and relationship units at three levels of importance in the content structure of 21 prose passages. The data were colelcted as part of an earlier study of the effects of three writing tasks (notetaking, answering study…

Most freshman composition textbooks promote one discourse structure, usually stressing early placement of the points of an essay. This can lock rapidly changing writers into composing according to only one format. In addition, adhering to a prescribed structure rather than focusing on meaning too often causes structure--not meaning--to control the…

Intended for English teachers early in their careers and for teachers retraining to teach English, and applicable to English/language arts classrooms across all grade levels, this guide offers practices drawn from classroom experience and from writing project experience that implement a tenable, successful theory of learning to write. The…

Stressing the importance of incorporating speech skills throughout the curriculum, the articles in this journal provide ideas for developing speaking skills in all subjects and at all levels. The titles of the articles and their authors include the following: (1) "Speaking Skills: A Few Tips from an Old Timer" (Geoffrey R. Butler); (2)…

Many learning disabled secondary school students have difficulties with text organization in both subject area reading and expository writing. Problems may include difficulty in following the main ideas in text, recognizing the main text topics and their interrelationships, or recognizing the subordinate and superordinate ideas and examples.…

Intended for writing teachers and administrators of middle school through college writing programs, this guide suggests how to translate approaches to teaching composition into computer assisted instruction (CAI) software. The book encourages writing teachers to see themselves as composition specialists who can team up with specialists in computer…

Sixth grade students can use cinquain poems to explore language, learn grammar, and write creatively. Before learning about cinquains, students should be introduced to simpler poetic forms. To introduce cinquains, the teacher writes a simple example on the board and has the students informally figure out the parts of speech and grammatical…

Teachers of composition have an obligation to students to know what assumptions underlie their teaching methodology. Every writing course, no matter what its format, represents a particular construct of reality, of seeing the world and the individual in the world, which, in addition to writing skills, is passed on to students. Several useful…

Studies of text comprehension have suggested that readers focus on different levels of ideational unit while reading, thereby affecting the quality of their comprehension of the text. A study examined the viability of the deep-surface categorization with regard to essay-writing and the relation of different approaches to writing to the quality of…

A study examined the re-entry female student as a composite of the various roles she plays, and also traced the changes that occurred during her first semester in college, specifically in composition class. Internal and external factors, both positive and negative; the writing process itself; and the mode and focus of instruction during that…

As an extension of a two-year longitudinal study involving various aspects of children's writing, a study examined the function of children's oral language during creative writing sessions in typical classroom settings. Using ethnographic style techniques, researchers conducted 46 writing episode observations of seven fifth graders in the spring…

Scholars from varied disciplines--first language (L1) acquisition, second language (L2) acquisition, composition research, and cognitive psychology--have found a high level of permeability in their search for more effective classroom models of writing instruction. Among the most influential work in this area has been Stephen Krashen's theory of L2…

To examine the effects of word processing on basic writers, a pilot study compared two classes of basic writers (40 students)--one class using word processors and one class using handwriting--at Glenville State College in West Virginia. At the beginning of the semester, students from both sections wrote one explanatory essay and one persuasive…

One approach to the development of writing skills at the upper high school level involves modeling, objectivity, revision, and editing. Modeling requires the teacher to reproduce one major writing assignment so that students can observe directly how the teacher attacks the assignment, completing it within the same time frame as they themselves…

To determine what effect the perceived audience and purpose of a written piece has on its quality, 30 high ability and 30 low ability writers were selected on the basis of a college placement examination and instructed to write two essays. Half of the students were given specific rhetorical contexts (audience and purpose) as well as topics.…