The Pennsylvania Comprehensive Reading/Communication Arts Plan (PCRP) is a language arts curriculum providing four critical experiences that all students need in order to become competent in reading, writing, listening, and speaking: responding to literature, sustained silent reading, oral and written composing, and investigating and mastering…

A study investigated what basic writers think they are doing when they write and whether those perceptions are related to their writing achievement. A total of 134 students, high school seniors in a program of extra academic help and college freshmen in a compensatory composition course, completed a questionnaire that elicited data about their…

The New Brunswick Writing Assessment Program implemented in grades five, eight, and eleven in New Brunswick (Canada) public schools in 1978 is described in this report, which includes the specific assignments for each grade, a discussion of the general holistic scoring approach used, and characteristics of the responses at each grade, including…

An approach to promote student editing of their own compositions, to be used in intermediate English as a second language classes, is discussed. Although editing or monitoring may not improve the communicative accuracy of a written message, it may give the message a more native-like quality. Monitoring works best on morphemes which are acquired…

A year-long study of the writing growth of eight seventh grade children was conducted to determine whether knowledge of reading rhetoric could be directly applied to personal writing behavior. It was assumed that active comprehension of a distinctive literary model would provide awareness of the structure of narrative prose and improve the…

The aim of the South Carolina Basic Skills Assessment Program was to meet legislative requirements, to improve instruction and to integrate instructional sensitivity into the state's educational programs for grades K-12 in the basic skill areas of reading, writing and mathematics. In their task of identifying, compiling and revising educational…

The materials in this manual include the activities and creative writing samples from a summer inservice writing skills workshop conducted for 32 teachers from seven school districts. The outlined writing activities cover a variety of topics that involve describing real and imaginary objects, naming objects in a newly created world, writing poetry…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: the effectiveness of media presentations in teaching research skills; language as a means of increasing perception; language arts curriculum planning and execution…

Major findings of the 1974-1977 Massachusetts statewide educational assessment are summarized and some readily available and useful instructional resources are identified. The findings are designed to assist teachers and administrators in discussion. Each section begins with a commentary and is followed by a review of findings, a discussion of…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 20 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: the effect of vocabulary instruction on the comprehension of poor readers; contextual methods of teaching sight words to elementary remedial readers; the effects…

Students nearing high school graduation need more than the skills and information given them in the past 12 years; they also need to know "how" to learn. The Senior Seminar, which is a program offering a semester of interdisciplinary experiential learning, teaches students to become independent, self-directed learners by first presenting…

The study described in this paper was designed to compare the composing processes of three black adolescent females--a low, a moderate, and a high user of nonstandard dialect. After explaining the procedures used in selecting the subjects on the basis of their degree of usage of nonstandard dialect features, the paper describes the research…

THE RESULTS OF AN EXPERIMENT CONDUCTED AT THE CENTRAL MISSOURI STATE COLLEGE INDICATE THAT IN COMPARISON TO THE CLASSROOM LECTURE APPROACH TO COMPOSITION, THE LECTURE-TUTORIAL METHOD SAVES TIME AND RESULTS IN A SHARPER FOCUS OF SUBJECT MATTER AND A MORE INTENSE COMMUNICATION BETWEEN PUPIL AND TEACHER. A CLASS OF 25 STUDENTS WAS GIVEN ONE HOUR PER…

OVER A 13-YEAR PERIOD, EXTENSIVE LONGITUDINAL DATA WERE COLLECTED ON EVERY ASPECT OF THE LINGUISTIC BEHAVIOR OF 338 OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, SCHOOL CHILDREN AS THEY PROGRESSED FROM KINDERGARTEN THROUGH GRADE 12. TAPED ORAL INTERVIEWS AND A WIDE RANGE OF TESTS AND INVENTORIES WERE CONDUCTED ANNUALLY TO MEASURE READING ACHIEVEMENT, LISTENING ABILITY,…

RECENT RESEARCH WOULD SEEM TO IMPLY THAT THE RESULT OF INTENSIVE TEACHER-CORRECTION OF STUDENT COMPOSITION DOES NOT JUSTIFY THE EFFORT. IF TEACHER-CORRECTION DOES NOT PRODUCE THE IMPROVEMENT OF STUDENT COMPOSITION, PERHAPS PEER-CORRECTION WOULD BE MORE EFFECTIVE. A REVIEW OF THE FEW PERTINENT STUDIES INDICATES THAT PEER-CORRECTION IS AT LEAST AS…