An activity book presents strategies and suggestions to help elementary teachers lead their students through the five steps of the writing process: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. A student activity page has children use artwork to inspire writing. (SM)

Discusses the IEA Written Composition Study in relation to other IEA studies, national cultural patterns, and research on writing in general. Describes research design problems, development of representative writing tasks, and a scoring scheme based on a system of writing competencies and preferences and their elements. Summarizes preliminary…

Reports on a study of 93 McMaster University (Ontario) sophomore history students about their secondary school preparation in history. Finds that most respondents felt comfortable about their high school education, but a significant number were uncomfortable with their preparation for tutorial work, notetaking, and essay writing. (CFR)

Describes a year-long project to create and produce English-language, school-based, community newspapers at Israeli high schools using a Teacher's Guide specifically designed for the project. The project enhanced students' newspaper and journalism skills, reading and writing skills, community involvement, teamwork, critical thinking skills, and…

The experiences of two teachers describe how BreadNet, an online professional-development and educational conference, enables teachers with similar interests to work together and maintain a sense of community. BreadNet allowed their rural schools to participate in projects with distant schools, leading to improvements in the quantity and quality…

Argues that the best moment for responding to student writing is before any draft is completed. Analyzes ways in which this can be put into practice in the composition classroom and reports on how a group of undergraduate, intermediate-level Portuguese English-as-a-Second-Language writers reacted to this kind of pre-text feedback. (Author/SM)

Describes the use of a multi-part journal format, known as the synthesis journal, in academic assistance composition classes. The journal promotes students' abilities to synthesize ideas from four major sources--text, lecture, class discussion, and personal experience--and encourages higher-order thinking skills without shifting attention from the…

Considers how teachers can help students become literate, critical, creative thinkers by aligning curricula, teaching strategies, and instructional resources. Promotes literacy, higher-level thinking, and writing skills through the interdisciplinary approach of combining language and art. Suggests that creating a comic strip stimulates and…

A survey of 183 Latino family members of students with visual impairments found that although family members expressed positive attitudes toward schools and teachers and believed that families need to be involved, they were not as positive about their ability to help their children in reading and math. (Author/CR)

Offers suggestions to help educators prepare manuscripts for submission, presenting ideas from a 1996-1997 survey of editors. The ideas include the following: know your audience; know your journal; know the journal's writing style; write concisely; edit, revise, and proofread; note tables; and check references. Three sidebars present tips for…

Describes three pilot projects carried out with a special version of a computer-assisted language-learning activity, known as SEQUITUR, that seeks to develop awareness of cohesive devices and coherence features by displaying the start of a text and offering possible continuations. Usage logs of responses given by native and nonnative speakers of…

Explores the effect of age of the intended addressee on the written performance of Japanese university students. Twenty-six female students each wrote letters to three people they knew from a recent study abroad program: one significantly older than themselves, one significantly younger, and one approximately the same age. Analysis of the…

Describes a three-year project devoted to fostering semester-long e-mail exchanges between American and German college students. Based on the tandem approach to language learning, peer tutoring via e-mail helped improve students' writing ability and cross-cultural competence. Presents types of writing activities and suggestions for setting up…

Librarians are taking up the challenge of teaching students to use World Wide Web resources in a meaningful way. This article discusses issues and implications for library instruction raised by the authors' experiences of teaching the Web as an additional information source to freshmen in business writing courses. (Author)

Investigated the efficacy of integrating task-based e-mail activities into a process-oriented English-as-Second-Language (ESL) writing class. Particular focus was on the linguistic characteristics of 132 pieces of e-mail writing by ESL students in tasks that differed in terms of purpose, audience interaction, and task structure. Computerized text…