Project LIFTS (Learning Improvement through Teaching Strategies) was designed to serve adult basic education (ABE) students enrolled at Johnson County Community College (Kansas) who are diagnosed as having a specific learning disability. These students enrolled in Basic English, a pre-General Educational Development Test preparation class, and…

Learning to communicate is important for today's foreign language student, and it is important to provide meaningful communicative experiences in writing as well as speaking the language. A letter exchange between peers can provide a meaningful and exciting writing experience for lower-level students. While not entirely without problems, arranging…

Drawing from classroom experience and current composition theory and research, this guidebook presents basic assumptions about teaching developmental writing and explores elements of the composing process. Five basic assumptions about developmental writing are discussed: (1) because writing is a skill, courses should be how-to or process-oriented;…

Designed for use by elementary school teachers responsible for working with students whose writing test scores indicate a need for remediation, this guide has as its goal the improvement of students' writing skills on a day-to-day basis. The first part of the guide describes the composing process and defines the characteristics of an effective…

The scope and sequence of oral and written communication skills in this kindergarten through grade 12 language arts curriculum guide are organized in three ways: (1) as a total overview of all skills at all levels, (2) as a summary of each skill with grade level designations for attention, and (3) as checklists for each grade level to aid…

Intended to make the educational community aware of how research has defined acceptable practice in writing assessment, this annotated bibliography examines research about writing evaluation. Divided into five sections, the first section of the bibliography surveys some psychological and linguistic studies of the development of students' writing…

One way of giving students a sense of audience in their writing is to combine speech communication and written communication in the classroom. If students can be taught to write as they talk, they can perceive their audience to be real people rather than the amorphous "indefinite other" they typically write for in the traditional writing…

The letter of application should make use of message strategies that show the writer's awareness of the explicit needs of specific readers. However, very few students are able to write them, partially as a result of the audience analysis procedures that are suggested for student use. Students need a reader analysis procedure to help them learn…

Writing researchers must be concerned with whether the instruments they are using are constructed as soundly as possible and, if so, whether they are performing the necessary analytic procedures to interpret the results correctly. To examine the logic in the construction of J. A. Daly and M. D. Miller's Writing Apprehension Test and the incomplete…

A study explored children's notions of what stories and reports are, how they can be organized, and when to use them, as revealed in the stories and reports they wrote or recalled and in their responses to questions about each. Sixty-seven high achieving children in grades three, six, and nine read and wrote similar kinds of stories and reports.…

In a study designed as a pilot project to test a taxonomy of noun phrases (NPs) and indicate results to be expected from a larger subsequent survey, 13 essays from a basic writing class and 10 essays from an advanced composition class were analyzed for four NP types: (1) those requiring earlier text information for full interpretation, (2) those…

A study examined two questions: Do students include more information or present it more concisely and explicitly when speaking or writing? and, Does language show different thematic relationships (through syntax or diction) depending upon the mode? Twenty-four community college students viewed one of two brief films and responded orally or in…

A study was conducted to investigate the relationship between the intellectual maturity of college students and evidence of rhetorical maturity in their writing--specifically, why some students write better than others, since general language abilities cannot account for all the differences between good and poor writing. By focusing on college…

A study assessed the effects of the Mason program (a supplementary language arts program in which expository writing is introduced) on writing skills, such as writing mechanics, expression, and related thinking skills. These skills were measured by standardized tests and by actual writing performance. Subjects, approximately 400 second grade…

Assisting students with written work continues to be a challenging task for today's teachers. Outlining represents a relevant instructional technique to help students develop self-regulated writing skills and promote higher order thinking. The author shares writing advice that can be used by teachers working in traditional face-to-face…