This literature-research unit centered on a study of the religious quest provides a vehicle for developing several skills in addition to involving students in an examination of the nature of religious experience and the roles religion can play in the lives of people. The student will learn how to write extended definitions, compare and contrast…

Recent developments in such fields as linguistics, logic, information theory, computer science, speech act theory, and psychology can lead to a greater interdisciplinary understanding of the process of writing (defined as purposeful activity involving language use in special modes). Purposes for writing, which may be correlated with the many…

Two sentence-combining tests and one piece of free writing per student provided the data in a study designed to determine whether the heavy writing emphasis given British children in their elementary years gives them significantly greater writing skill than their counterparts in the United States, who write comparatively infrequently. The data…

Following an organizational outline of specific language skills associated with expository writing (but applicable to creative writing as well), this booklet charts the introductory, teaching/refinement, and mastery levels from kindergarten through grade 12 for writing skills in the categories of sentence structure, paragraph structure,…

This booklet on study skills for entering college students provides direction on the following topics: using time, textbooks, notetaking, exams, reports and essays, libraries, and getting help. Questions the student should consider about scheduling time and sample daily/weekly/quarterly schedules are included. Textbook reading should consist of…

Noting that a study of semantics can inform teachers' understanding of the reading process, this paper describes seven basic types of meaning, illustrates how the interrelatedness of meanings within a semantic field may be shown, and discusses children's acquisition of semantic fields. It cites research into the development of semantic fields in…

This book reviews the research literature relevant to the language experience approach to the teaching of reading, in which instruction is based upon the use of reading materials created by writing down children's spoken language. The first major section provides a narrative review of the research studies, organized, for the most part,…

This conference report summarizes major speeches, including such topics as "Teaching Effective Writing Skills to Dialectically Different Students" and "New Approaches for Teaching Students Standard English." The four objectives of this landmark conference were as follows: (1) to assist black and other minority students in the acquisition of…

The intent of this annual conference is to provide a medium of exchange for practitioners in the field, with each person acting as a resource person for the others. To provide topical focuses, two presentations were made: Dr. Joan Roloff discussed "The Place of the Learning Center in Remedial/Compensatory Education in Community Colleges," and Dr.…

A survey of California community colleges was conducted in order to ascertain what methods were being used to identify students for placement in freshman English courses, and what types of programs and services were being offered for entering students with reading and writing deficiencies. Of 100 colleges surveyed, 64 responded. There seems to be…

The teaching of composition in secondary schools over the last decade has not adequately developed the writing skills of urban students. Parts of this dilemma stem from the following three factors: inequities in public school financing; racism; and the obscure position of composition within the English curriculum, with preferences given to grammar…

This speech, a product of the workshop on "Media: Minorities and Sex Stereotyping", is said to be intended to provide a vivid picture of how to write about minorities for minority youth from a "white" point of view. The author attributes his success in writing to the conviction that race is no factor in the dimensions of human joys and despairs,…

This study examined first grade children's spelling of vowel sounds in relationship to the spellings these children were taught in their reading series and to the phonological aspects of the sounds. The subjects for the study were 12 first graders, six boys and six girls, in a public school in a Boston suburb. Written work done in school was…

A language arts program for the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades is detailed in this document. Outlines of the scope and sequence of course components and lists of program objectives are given for each grade. Following these program objectives, the document consists of outline sketches for each course topic, including the scope and sequence of…

Elementary and secondary teachers are recognizing that today's children are products of a visual era who bring visual literacy to their school language learning. Visual resources may be developed and used as a valuable motivational technique. The following programs utilizing this approach are outlined: Dorothy Lopez' development of polaroid…