Illiterate workers in industrial jobs can endanger themselves and fellow workers by misreading warning signs and can cost companies millions by misreading instructions. The problem of literacy is also apparent in offices, where often dictated correspondence must be retyped at least once because of errors. Of 800 companies surveyed, 35% felt they…

The production of a book review journal by students is suggested as a way of encouraging reading and of developing clear, expository writing. Guidelines are provided for the sequential development of such a journal. Criteria are offered for evaluating fiction and nonfiction books, with examples of annotations featuring style, period or setting of…

Fifteen basic skills improvement projects in Wisconsin school districts are described. These projects are federally funded (through the Elementary Secondary Education Act Title II) and are limited to adoptions or adaptations of programs which proved to be successful in other school districts. Basic skills are identified as reading, mathematics,…

The three articles in this journal issue focus on composition problems and alternatives. The topics discussed are compositional invention, composition based on students' experiences, and an oral technique for teaching basic composition. The issue also contains reviews of recent publications in the field of composition. (FL)

An exploration of the linguistic patterns and conversational strategies of adult learners was conducted to clarify the relationship between individuals' oral communicative ability and their levels of proficiency in the nonoral literate modes of reading and writing. The connection between social class and language development was also examined.…

A deductive-inductive sequence of writing instruction, in which students are instructed systematically before they begin to write, would help students learn to write well. Educators who propose a trial and error pattern ignore the facts that those learning to write do not have unlimited time in which to learn and are not dealing with an inherent…

Arising from the Schools Council Development Project on Writing Across the Curriculum, this book deals with talking, reading, thinking, and learning, as well as writing, as these processes take place in secondary schools. Suggesting that too much of the writing and talking in schools is used to test what students know and too little used to enable…

The basic components of the basic writing program at Rutgers University, designed to prepare disadvantaged students for the core course in English, are a combination of reading and writing activities with as much individualized instruction as possible. The components include three courses, a learning center, and an annual workshop in the teaching…

The Learning to Write Sentence by Sentence curriculum was developed at the College of Marin (California) to promote increased student awareness of quality in communication by providing concentrated exercise in writing. This self-paced course forces the student to think before writing, by using rhetorical and complicated instructions on how to…

Recent research projects have indicated that a majority of adolescent and adult students have not reached a formal level of cognitive functioning and must therefore be taught rhetorical modes such as comparison and classification. A study was constructed to investigate the cognitive skills development of average college freshmen and to test…

While the chapters of this book present a variety of perspectives, they share the common goal of redirecting and revitalizing research on written composition. The authors review research on written discourse and the composing process and raise questions regarding information and skills that teachers and researchers need to consider. The chapters…

Teachers at Western Illinois University help improve the self-image of students in college remedial English courses in the following ways: (1) they try to alleviate students' feelings of failure through such methods as stressing the acceptability of spoken dialects but pointing out the practical need for writing in Standard English, and…

A "generative stylistics" approach to writing presents usable, conscious standards for the production, arrangement, and rearrangement of written discourse thereby teaching students how to make appropriate decisions about language usage. Based on research studies that indicate the dependence of the writing process on the decision making…

The use of technology in teaching composition, which has increased in recent years, began with a few filmstrips on grammar. Then slide-tape presentations were used to stimulate writing, and overhead projectors helped in evaluating writing in class. Now, videocassettes are used to record commonly repeated minilectures and minilessons on spelling,…

Seven hundred and fifty compositions, randomly selected from National Assessment of Educational Progress essays written by 9-, 13- and 17-year-olds, were analyzed in a study of the skills that go into the writing of a good composition. The essays were first rated as high, medium, or low in quality. A total of 43 different indices reported or…