This action research project described a program for increasing student skills in writing. The targeted population consisted of fifth grade academically talented, regular education, and inclusion students in a middle class, western suburb of a Midwestern city. The inadequacy of student writing skills was documented through writing samples, local…

Designed to meet the needs of children of various age and ability levels, this book provides teachers of grades 4-9 with over 250 writing activities and reproducible worksheets for teaching students how to write effective compositions, essays, stories, poems, and more. Activities in the book focus on the various stages of the writing process,…

There has been a growing interest in the use of the computer in language learning because of its capacity to offer interactive learning and to handle a much wider range of activities than other educational aids. Although the traditional view of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) implies the substitution of the computer for the teacher and…

An American culture curricular unit is described for an integrated skills content based course of an intensive English program. There are five components to the unit, including: (1) listening and speaking; (2) reading and writing; (3) fieldtrips; (4) academic study skills; and (5) English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students as amateur…

Intended to determine whether, given the expense of the commercial Writing To Read (WTR) program, equal or better results could be obtained through other means, a study assessed the effectiveness of three methods of promoting composition in kindergarten and first grade classrooms. Three groups of kindergarten and first grade students from low…

Reading and writing have traditionally been treated as separate processes, but some research on the relationship suggests that the two processes should be taught together. It is also proposed that skill in recognizing a text's main idea is a summarizing skill, demanding the cognitive and linguistic prerequisites appropriate to the text type. Good…

Based on a series of clear lines workshops, this guide about clear language in the workplace was written for people concerned about literacy and clear communication at work. The materials and activities help not only people with reading problems to design documents, memos, letters, and bulletins, but help, also, people who read well. The guide's…

This publication contains an annotated bibliography of 19 sources of information for instructors of General Educational Development Test (GED) preparation classes and adult basic education classes. An introduction discusses the literature search that identified materials and information to help GED instructors teach adult education, generally, and…

Many universities rely on multiple choice or true/false tests to admit students to mass communication programs. The high stakes that prospective majors face suggest that there is an urgent need for departments to rethink their assumptions about entrance testing, as a narrow conception of scholastic ability can undermine any attempt to "weed…

One of the main advantages of the naturalistic approach to classroom research is that the observations are of natural phenomena, occuring in circumstances which the researcher ultimately hopes to generalize. Some problem areas are associated with this approach, however. Observers must obtain complete and accurate records of classroom activities…

The need for the liberal arts curriculum to incorporate new technology in order for education to reach its potential is examined in this paper, which also looks at the potential for computer-based telecommunications to extend continued education for professionals. A survey of applications of computer-based telecommunications in reading and writing…

An elementary school unit on punctuation skills is divided into nine sections. Section 1 contains a pretest which is repeated in section 9 as a posttest. Section 2 consists of a series of punctuation mark caricatures to put on the classroom bulletin board. Sections 3 through 7 contain material on the following topics: end of sentence punctuation,…

To determine if using visual patterns can help technically oriented people create coherent papers, 97 students enrolled in a beginning composition class were given five hours of instruction in the use of the "hub and spokes" (central idea supported by examples), "S-curve" (pro-con), and pyramid (inductive or deductive) formats. Holistic…

Researchers studying emerging literacy have begun building a theory of literacy development that links the processes of reading and writing. Their findings suggest that a child's emerging literacy is based on three factors: a functional expectation for print to make logical sense; an expectation of how language operates in alternate contexts; and…

Noting that although a great deal of empirical research has been done to investigate the writing rules commonly taught, this paper points out that no one has yet constructed a deep theory of the relationship between cognition and writing that confirms the writing rules and explains how they work. The paper then uses theories and research in the…