For use by teachers in helping students become better writers, this booklet describes and illustrates cognitive mapping, a prewriting technique that helps students combine their verbal and visual skills in order to produce ideas and to plan stories, plays, reports, or essays. The first section of the booklet discusses the interrelations between…

A cooperative writing workshop that attempts to engage first-term college freshmen in a variety of genuine writing problems by stressing the class as audience, the use of daily journals, feedback from small group discussions, and frequent revision is described in the first part of this document. The remainder of the paper presents a case study of…

Peer evaluation was implemented in a college composition seminar to explore its effectiveness. The class of 13 students met once a week, workshop style, for 4 hours. Students wrote short papers (three to five typed pages) every week in an assigned mode (critical analysis, social commentary, familiar essay) but on topics of their own choosing. For…

Drawn from a California conference that brought together writing instructors and researchers, the papers in this compilation address problems in writing, policies affecting both writing instruction and assessment, and possibilities for improving both areas. Papers in the first section of the book represent positions of eight separate entities: (1)…

Intended for use as a standard textbook or a student handbook, this book serves as a reference tool for reading and writing activities. In addition to guidelines concerning reading and writing and library use, the book contains lists, tables and information usually found in an almanac. The sections are divided as follows: (1) grammatical terms,…

Developed by teachers to provide a district-wide description of English course content, this curriculum guide is intended for use as a basis for planning instructional activities in a number of areas. The guide consists of four main sections: (1) an introduction, which provides a statement of philosophy, a scope and sequence of skills within…

The Shared Responsibility Model (SRM), a language process model that has been used effectively in classrooms that serve limited and proficient English speakers interacting within the same environment, can be utilized with Navajo children. SRM's philosophy recognizes that students learn and retain vocabulary most effectively when they: (1) learn…

With practical applications for parents and teachers, this book uses diary entries, tape recordings, and videotapes made by the child's mother from a researcher's perspective to chronicle a child's reading and writing development from birth to age three. The introduction provides an overview of how children learn to talk, read, and write;…

The integration of content area writing instruction into the history curriculum has been a slow process. A history course at Ohio University (Athens) offers students experience in writing the type of materials written by practicing historians: book reviews, journal articles, and articles for encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries. Such short…

A two-part study intended to investigate what constitutes successful teacher response to student writing is described in this report. The described study consisted of a survey of response practices of 560 elementary and secondary school teachers who were among the most successful in their communities as judged by directors of the sites of the…

The reading/writing project described in this document examined the basic cognitive activities children engage in when reading and writing, involved 67 children from grades 3, 6, and 9, and addressed these questions: Since reading and writing both involve the development of meaning, is there a common language core, or routines, that children…

Acknowledging the importance of sight to the writing process, the paper elucidates the processes of vision related to the composing process. In the opening section the physics of light and vision, optic neuroanatomy, and cortical responses to visual stimuli are explained. Next, theories of vision and data mapping are examined and their…

One of a number of reports of a study of the writing development of 14- to 16-year-old students, this booklet is divided into two parts. The first part uses five criteria to analyze what four secondary students learn from composing imaginary stories: (1) What resources are used in the setting or situation? (2) What kind of ordering is used? (3)…

The process-oriented advanced technical writing course described in this paper leads students progressively through the writing and editing processes while involving them in the technical writing of their respective disciplines. The readings, exercises, and report assignments used in the course are discussed to show how these activities awaken…

This writing skills curriculum provides Adult Basic Education (ABE) teachers with a perspective on intended writing goals for their ABE students, delineates specific writing objectives, and presents a framework within which writing activities can effectively take place. Introductory material provides a guide to the use of the curriculum and…