Intended for English teachers early in their careers and for teachers retraining to teach English, and applicable to English/language arts classrooms across all grade levels, this guide offers practices drawn from classroom experience and from writing project experience that implement a tenable, successful theory of learning to write. The…

Intended to involve students in language and communication study in such a way that significant thinking occurs, this collection of teaching ideas outlines ways to teach literature and composition that engage the students in such thinking processes as inferring, sequencing, predicting, classifying, problem solving, and synthesizing. The activities…

Although student writers will accept evaluation more readily from their peers than from their instructors, beginning writers in particular hesitate to offer suggestions to another writer because they do not want to hurt their fellow students' feelings, and because they do not feel they know enough to evaluate someone else's work. The collaborative…

Intended for writing teachers and administrators of middle school through college writing programs, this guide suggests how to translate approaches to teaching composition into computer assisted instruction (CAI) software. The book encourages writing teachers to see themselves as composition specialists who can team up with specialists in computer…

Addressing a variety of concerns of writing center directors and staff, directors of freshman composition, and English department chairs, the papers in this collection discuss writing center research and evaluation, writing center tutors, and computers in the writing center. The titles of the essays and their authors are as follows: (1) "Narrative…

One teacher's conference method of teaching a freshman English-as-a-second-language (ESL) composition course uses a system of periodic fifteen-minute student-teacher conferences instead of written comments on compositions. The conferences are followed by student revision and resubmission of the composition as many times as necessary. During the…

The English Microlab Registry (EMR) was first designed as a database, or research tool, for planners of English microlabs in order to give them access to information about all aspects of microlab management. But EMR also provides descriptive data about what a microlab is and may well provide insight into whether those labs will survive. An…

A description is provided of a pilot study conducted at Butte College to develop and test evaluation procedures for the college's remedial and developmental reading, English, and math programs. Part I of the report includes five sections: (1) a description of the remedial reading, English, and mathematics programs as they existed at Butte College…

Sixth grade students can use cinquain poems to explore language, learn grammar, and write creatively. Before learning about cinquains, students should be introduced to simpler poetic forms. To introduce cinquains, the teacher writes a simple example on the board and has the students informally figure out the parts of speech and grammatical…

When students have difficulty writing, it is often because they are apathetic or afraid of failing, rather than because of a serious lack of skill. Basic writing teachers must break through student apathy and fear before the students can begin to progress. One way is to ask basic writers to unscramble sentences or analyze ambiguous sentences to…

Organizational stratification and writers' attitudes played an important part in the rejection of a proposed editorial review program at a university computing center. A peer review board, which consisted of four composition instructors, was established by the center director, in cooperation with a composition teacher consultant, to ensure the…

The writing manual for a course in basic Pashto teaches the Pashto alphabet: the letters, their sounds, their names, and their shapes in various combinations with other letters. Each lesson, designed to take one class hour, consists of a presentation of the material to be learned, exercises using that material, exercises reviewing previously…

Teachers of composition have an obligation to students to know what assumptions underlie their teaching methodology. Every writing course, no matter what its format, represents a particular construct of reality, of seeing the world and the individual in the world, which, in addition to writing skills, is passed on to students. Several useful…

A consulting physician's report on the physiological, social, and psychiatric states of an alcoholic patient, written for the attending physician and other interested parties, is analyzed for coherence. The need for coherence in the presentation of the complex interrelationships in the patient's social context is the primary focus of the analysis.…

Focusing on ways to teach fourth-grade students the machine skills they need to make the computer a fluent writing tool, this study sought to identify the word processing skills that students need to learn and the ones that are most difficult, and the instructional approaches that work best in teaching word processing skills. The problems and…