Produced by the participants at a summer curriculum development workshop, this booklet has a threefold purpose: to help educators in analyzing both the process and product of student writing to find ways of improving that writing, to provide activities for generating more and better student writing and for encouraging students to revise and edit…

One of the newest theories of reading states that readers rely on graphic, syntactic, and semantic cues to get meaning from a text. In the area of syntax, some recent studies not only support its importance but seem to indicate that sentence combining exercises used in writing classes may improve students' syntax sufficiently to help them in…

Maintaining that sentence-combining language experience is the single most beneficial tool currently available to improve student writing, this paper speculates about the value and effects of the adoption of the language experience approach across the English curriculum. It presents six tasks that need to be undertaken by teachers, researchers,…

The development and testing of a visual stimulus for writing, to be used in the initial assessment of liberal arts students at the University of Michigan, is described in this paper. The paper first discusses the questions considered by the university committee charged with establishing the assessment process regarding student writers' fluency,…

Literature can be used in a writing course if the teacher carefully chooses the literature to be studied, if the writing assignments are sequenced so that they make some kind of developmental sense, and if the writing activity is used to clarify student thinking about the literature. Attention to these three elements was essential to the success…

This is one in a series of eight discussion pamphlets produced by the Writing Across the Curriculum Project dealing with some of the issues connected with writing in the schools and their relation to learning. This pamphlet is concerned with various aspects of the Bullock Committee Report. The first section maps the various ways in which teachers…

Recent trends in composition research indicate that attention has turned away from the parts of the writing product toward the steps involved in the writing process. There are two common threads to this research: (1) writing has a number of distinct stages including prewriting, writing, and editing, and (2) errors are a natural part of learning,…

Thirty college students--two sets from each of two freshman writing courses--wrote a total of 120 essays on four assigned topics in a study to measure the effectiveness of large group instruction augmented by multimedia presentations as compared to small group instruction with traditional media presentations. Sixty of the essays were read by four…

TWO FIRST GRADE CLASSES, ONE USING THE INITIAL TEACHING ALPHABET (ITA) AND ONE USING TRADITIONAL ORTHOGRAPHY (TO), WERE RANDOMLY SELECTED FROM A SCHOOL IN EACH OF 4 SCHOOL DISTRICTS. THE TOTAL SAMPLE CONSISTED OF 100 CHILDREN IN ITA CLASSES AND 100 CHILDREN IN TO CLASSES. THE CLASSES WERE GROUPED HETEROGENEOUSLY. THE PINTNER- CUNNINGHAM PRIMARY…

This 11th-grade unit on language of discourse is designed to help students gain the ability to evaluate argument, to construct logical and reasonable discourse, and to recognize ethical standards of free speech and inquiry. Stephen Toulmin's model of "evidence-warrant-claim" is used as a basic pattern for both the evaluation and…

This 15-unit, linguistically oriented text is designed for two semesters' work in formal Arabic for the student who has completed one or more semesters of semi-intensive study equivalent to the related texts "Beginning Arabic" (ED 012 916) and "Writing Arabic" (ED 011 110) by the same authors. The material is carefully graded.…

This publication describes numerous films and shows how they can be used to teach verbal and visual skills. Separate sections examine the use of films in teaching reading and composition skills, literature appreciation, and visual literacy. An alphabetical index of films cited gives information for each film regarding year of release, length,…

The classroom interaction model is a strategy to help both teachers and students with reading comprehension. It focuses on literary or informational work rather than on specific skills abstracted from the work or skills proposed by reading texts or curriculum guides. The interaction model indicates that interpretation, application, and…

In order to help underprepared students entering college in an open admissions program learn to write original research papers, a method was devised which relates the students' experiences in the nonacademic world to their academic assignments. Students first visit a local business, store, or institution with which they are familiar and write an…

Designed as a supplement to "Responding: Ginn Interrelated Sequences in Literature," this evaluation guide offers the following: a discussion of general objectives for literature study, interpretative measures for use with the diagnostic test of specific skills, student attitude scales, a check list and evaluation procedure for observing…