This document defines culturally disadvantaged students as those students who have not had the environmental advantages that middle-class students have enjoyed, although not all such children are from homes of the poor. In viewing the research in the teaching of language arts skills to the culturally deprived, certain generalizations emerged. Some…

The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of exposure to and study of good literature on a child's ability to create written stories. Eighteen classes of fourth and sixth graders were divided into two experimental groups and one control group. One experimental group listened to selected books read aloud and participated in teacher led…

Many secondary school students, poor in reading and writing skills and disinterested in academic programs, evince boredom and often distract other students and teachers with disruptive behavior. Since routine reprimands or punishments prove irrelevant and outside assignments are usually ignored, a series of resource units for teachers of low track…

This curriculum guide reviews current theories on the teaching of writing, focuses on the nature of composition, and enumerates sequences of writing exercises for seventh and eighth grade teachers to consider for assigning to their students. Contents include "Rhetoric in the 1960's," which defines composition and explains what languaging is about;…

Designed to analyze and describe the transformational operations in sentences in written compositions, this test contains a list of 27 possible transformations, all variations of four basic transformational operations: addition, deletion, reordering, and combining. The developer reports an interrater reliability coefficient of .94. [This document…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of two methods of reading instruction on children's ability to write original compositions. The subjects for this study were 684 first and second graders. Of the 293 first grade children, 130 were receiving their reading instruction in i.t.a., while the remaining 163 children were working in…

The Instructional Objectives Exchange (IOX) collected for several subject areas objectives and measurement items based upon curricular material either submitted by teachers, schools, and school districts, or generated by the IOX staff. Contained in the English skills collection are 37 objectives and related evaluation items for grades 10-12. The…

Journalism is a profession, and the academic preparation for it whould be emulative of professional schools such as medicine and law rather than of liberal arts colleges. The purpose of education for journalism should be to produce the best possible newsgatherers, that is, reporters. In addition to preparing students in the basics of journalism,…

The hypothesis discussed in this article is that positive attention to the creative process with ample opportunity to write and tell stories and ideas will result in more competency in the skills of writing - and considerable more success and joy in the art of writing - than will the teaching of the skills per se in the early years. To nurture…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the level of writing achievement of a class of college freshmen who were exposed for one semester to a methodology in which the students selected the form and topic of writing assignments and publicly evaluated each others' writing, and in which the teacher acted only as a moderator of student…

The report presents results of the evaluation of the Effingham Program for the Improvement of Pre-College English, an advanced course in pre-college rhetoric offered to gifted students in several classes over a period of several years. The project attempted to improve both intellectual content and methods of instruction for gifted students in the…

A model for helping classroom teachers understand and evaluate the growth of children in oral and written compositions is presented. The recommended procedure is centered around T-unit analysis. The following sequence is one possible way the T-unit analysis procedure might be used by an elementary school teacher: (1) Divide all the sentences of a…

This self-study program for the high-school level contains lessons on: What to Look for in Narrative Writing, Interpreting Figurative Writing, Keeping Track of the Subject in Writing, and Reading Literature for Understanding. Each of the lessons concludes with a Mastery Test to be completed by the student. (DB)

This paper proposes that the personal theme is a solution to the problem of motivating high school students to write better. The author, a high school English teacher, found that his students wrote poorly because they were writing on topics of which they had no intimate knowledge and because the theme assignments pleased the teacher, not the…

The Quinmester course "Expository Writing" is designed to help students develop competence in writing topic sentences and expository paragraphs incorporating the methods of cause and effect, comparison and contrast, illustration or example. The process of composition is taught in the following sequence: identification of the audience;…