In order to determine the effects of writing for different audiences and in different modes of discourse on the syntactic complexity of compositions written by sixth and tenth grade students, 240 students were asked to write in three different modes (argumentive, descriptive, and narrative) to be read by a teacher and a best friend. There was a…

A study of the reliability of writing evaluation by teachers from various departments at Bowling Green State University is reported. One hundred papers from the Writing Proficiency Examination given by the Department of English to all students completing the freshman composition sequence were selected for evaluation. Thirty volunteer faculty…

To encourage reluctant readers, teachers can use a technique called "read a book in an hour." Students are assigned individual chapters of a paperback novel to read silently. After they have finished reading, they retell the significant chapter events, state the conflicts, and identify the characters as the teacher records the…

This paper advances the thesis that students should be trained to recognize acceptable and unacceptable performances in basic skill areas and should assume responsibility for attaining proficiency in these areas. Among the topics discussed are the value of having junior high school students check their own assignments, discover their errors, and…

This paper exemplifies and presents the rationale for notional writing materials which are currently being developed for use with advanced level ESL students. The basic assumption of these materials is that effective writing demands a clear sense of why something is being written, and for whom it is being written. The materials are organized…

In attempting to meet school-board mandates for competency-based testing in composition, educators must devise the most acceptable testing programs they can. This paper describes a design (the Paul Diederich system) for testing students' writing skills, which yields statistically reliable data on individual students, and reports on a New Orleans…

Traditional and self-paced methods of teaching college freshman composition were compared in this study of pretest and posttest essays written by selected freshman English composition classes. The 96 pretests and posttests obtained were rated analytically for unity, organization, development, style, and mechanics. Analysis of covariance indicated…

The report of the Bullock Committee of Enquiry was published in January 1975, under the title "A Language for Life," and presented extensive recommendations concerning all aspects of English teaching, including reading, writing, talking, and listening, the role of initial and inservice training, and monitoring of general levels of…

The purpose of this collection of papers is to serve as a guide for the English teacher in the field of technical and scientific writing. The eight main sections concern the definition and the teaching of technical writing; the skills, needs, and goals of the technical writing student; teacher appraisal of the technical writing curriculum;…

Two one-semester English courses, English 50.1 (English Fundamentals), concentrating on sentence construction, and English 50.2 (Basic Writing Skills), concentrating on paragraph development, were devised at Cerritos College (California) in an attempt to improve the effectiveness of the old English 50 (Grammar and Composition), which had combined…

The Adult Career Education Resources Survey was designed to (a) compile career information resources for adults and (b) provide materials that will encourage adult educators to integrate career education activities into ongoing curricula. The document was developed and revised by the Suvey staff to meet the second objective; it provides a group of…

This study determines the extent to which skills of written composition, as defined by a modern rhetorical theory, appear in a selected sample of resources available to teachers. The sources judged and evaluated in the content analysis were textbooks used in preparation of English teachers, textbooks used by students in English classes,…

Conflict is the basis of all stories and thus should appear in some form in the first sentence. There are three kinds of conflict: people vs. people; people vs. nature; and people vs. themselves. Conflict must be repeated in all the various elements of the story's structure, including the plot, which is the plan of action telling what happens to…

"Newsweek's" article "Why Johnny Can't Write" (Dec. 8, 1975), adopts a "know it all posture" which defies the real evaluation of the statistical decline in language skills among high school graduates. "Newsweek's" attribution of this decline to the presence of television culture and its focusing of blame on…

This study describes in detail the synthesis of two relatively new, widely accepted and critically approved teaching methods, writing workshops and peer tutoring programs, in a coordinated program designed to improve student writing skills and attitudes. After tracing the origin of this experiment to specific concerns about the use of standard…