A questionnaire was sent to schools and departments of journalism and mass communication to determine public relations subject areas in which courses had been added, dropped, or changed during the past three years. Responses from 113 schools (86.2% response rate) revealed that public relations is an expanding field of study, that net additions to…

Designed to help elementary and middle school language arts teachers structure a comprehensive objectives-based composition program, this guide attends to fundamental rhetorical concepts that should enable schools to effectively use existing resources while extending the range of instructional potentials in areas not often included in commercially…

Because inexperienced or basic writers depend on the semantics of everyday spoken dialogue when writing, research on written composition and the developmental links between spoken and written language should be more accessible to the practitioners who teach writing to those students. A review of the literature supports the theory of a semantic…

A series of three experiments obtained objective measures of skilled and unskilled writing that was prepared in response to a potentially hostile audience. The principal differences between the two groups of writers were that skilled writers were far more likely than unskilled writers to go beyond the narrow constraints of the task, to generate…

A project to investigate the effects on the language development of secondary school pupils of a study of transformational grammar as represented in the Oregon English Curriculum involved 250 students in a large, coeducational high school near Auckland, New Zealand. The students were divided into three matched groups who studied different English…

This bulletin, published three times annually, reports on promising practices in the pupil services disciplines serving Wisconsin youth, and stimulates professional activity in the pupil service field. This issue includes articles dealing with: (1) a teacher education program in communication skills; (2) a guide to counseling mentally handicapped…

A study was conducted to determine whether children in revising their writing to accommodate new information would make corresponding textual changes to preserve appropriate focus and cohesion. The subjects, 48 children each from grades three, six, and nine, were presented with a task that involved descriptions of pictures with incongruent…

This annotated bibliography covers the following topics in teaching English as a second language (ESL): tests, abstracts and indices, bibliographies and reviews, overviews of ESL testing, aptitude testing, specific tests (Test of English as a Foreign Language, Michigan Test, and standardized tests), testing speaking skills, testing listening…

This booklet is one of a series of teacher-written curriculum publications launched by the Bay Area Writing Project, each focusing on a different aspect of the teaching of composition. This booklet explains techniques that can be used by teachers in all subject areas to help students use writing, not merely as a means of testing knowledge, but as…

This booklet is one of a series of teacher-written curriculum publications launched by the Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP), each focusing on a different aspect of the teaching of composition. In it a college professor presents a personal narrative of his experience in a BAWP summer institute and how he applied the techniques learned at the…

This booklet is one of a series of teacher-written curriculum publications launched by the Bay Area Writing Project, each focusing on a different aspect of the teaching of composition. The introduction describes an analysis of predication that offers teachers insights into ways of helping students develop an expository thesis and study more…

BELIEVING FORMAL WRITTEN ENGLISH TO BE A "FOREIGN LANGUAGE" TO MOST AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL STUDENTS, RESEARCHERS USED THE AUDIO-LINGUAL METHOD OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION TO PROMOTE WRITING IMPROVEMENT IN FOURTH-GRADERS. TWO RANDOMLY-SELECTED CLASSES OF STUDENTS OF AVERAGE ABILITY COMPOSED THE STUDY POPULATION--ONE CLASS FOR THE EXPERIMENT,…

THE SEVENTH- AND EIGHTH-GRADE UNITS CONTAINED IN THIS GUIDE PROVIDE A SEQUENTIAL STUDY OF COMPOSITION WITH EMPHASIS UPON DICTION. THE SEVENTH-GRADE UNIT (10 LESSONS) DEALS WITH THE PROCESSES OF OBSERVATION, CLASSIFICATION, INDIVIDUALIZATION, REVISION, AND WITH AUTHOR INTENTION. THE EIGHT-LESSON UNIT FOR THE EIGHTH-GRADE IS CONCERNED WITH WRITING…

A process called focused holistic scoring has been developed for use in the Texas Assessment of Basic Skills to assess student performance on writing samples. This process is "holistic" because it evaluates a total piece of writing, and it is "focused" because it evaluates the writing in terms of two specific objectives…

The COMP-LAB, a CUNY-based writing course combining classroom instruction with an autotutorial writing laboratory for students deficient in standard written English, is described and evaluated in this assessment. The background and purpose of the project are discussed in the first two sections, prior to an extensive description of the project…