Argues that teachers who write are in a better position to guide students, provide useful feedback, and show the real value of writing. Discusses remembering the agony, sharing the ecstasy, giving authentic feedback, growing a community of writers, and remembering the reason people bother to write at all. (SR)

Outlines the writing process. Describes various classroom writing activities that offer simple frameworks, introductions to the process, and activities involved in each stage to help young children (even primary students) effectively use the writing process, and eagerly look forward to writing and publishing. (SR)

Discusses selected theories of second-language acquisition and their implications for developing a computer-assisted language-learning tool for learners of German,"Textana." Textana was planned as a generic text production tool to provide help to learners in outlining, editing, and postediting texts in German as a foreign language. (Author/VWL)

Describes one teacher's experience teaching writing as she gets involved in writing along with her students. Discusses how she uses her own writing as examples of the writing process for the students. Explores experiences teaching and writing fiction. (SG)

Maintains that whole language is not a prescriptive approach but a philosophy oriented toward student needs, inquiry, interaction, and, generally, "transaction" over "transmission." Discusses how a teacher becomes a whole language teacher, some of the difficulties of incorporating whole language into traditional curriculums, and the prospects for…

Examines the extent to which asking 20 entry-level and 19 basic-level college writing students to articulate their initial intentions for writing facilitated the identification of 3 kinds of instructional problems students face in moving from intentions to texts. Suggests that students with useful initial intentions write more effective texts than…

Observes, for a school year, a first grader's spontaneous utterances and actions while composing. Identifies seven shifts in the composing process, and identifies four factors that influenced these shifts. Suggests that during the transitional period, a child's ownership of the process is set in a complex relationship with the teacher and peers,…

Reviews empirical research carried out over the last 20 years in three distinct areas: (1) the characteristics of the texts learners produce; (2) the processes of students' composing; and (3) the sociocultural contexts where learning to write occurs. (Author/VWL)

Discusses a literature-inspired model of teaching writing and two scenarios of reading and writing connections in the classroom. Presents several reading and writing lessons drawn from the children's book "The Bat Boy and His Violin" by Gavin Curtis. Discusses Curtis' craft and demonstrates how to use this book to teach writing. Includes brief…

Relates how the author came into a generally contentious classroom of eleventh-grade developmental English students and how it became a place of cooperative reading and writing and critiquing through a democratic approach and a three-week project in which students wrote a fictional story via letter writing. Notes student's involvement and…

Analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of product, process, and genre approaches to writing in terms of their view of writing and how they see the development of writing. Argues that the three approaches are complementary, and identifies an approach that is informed by each of them. (Author/VWL)

Examines samples of primary-school-aged children's writing to identify and describe the various ways in which boys and girls use language to construct meaning, and to discuss the gendered ways of knowing and being that are revealed and constructed. Findings indicate that girls generally write longer, more complex texts, using a wider range of both…

Discusses how English-as-a-Second-Language students are seeking help at U.S. college and university writing centers. This trend emphasizes the complementary role of the writing center and ESL writing instruction in improving ESL writing skills. Writing center and ESL writing pedagogy share process and collaborative approaches, which emphasize the…

In this study seven 10-year-old to 11-year-old students peer-tutored seven six-year-old students in writing over a 10-week period. Tutoring took place over 20-minute sessions four times per week in the six-year-old students' regular classes during their usual writing time. The first author trained the tutors to assist tutees to (1) produce a…

Students in Grades 5 and 8 completed a 30-minute writing performance assessment and a writing performance assessment completed over 3 days. Assessments were evaluated on four traits (ideas, organization, conventions, and sentence fluency). A significant interaction was found at Grade 5 between length of time allotted for the assessment and…