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…

The five articles in this journal issue are intended for use by school administrators, and provide information on how to organize effective programs for achieving student writing competency. The first article discusses the development of New York State's Preliminary and Regents Competency Tests in Writing, analyzes sample student responses to one…

Before teachers can decide how to teach writing to nonstandard dialect speakers, they should determine whether college students can in fact learn to command a second dialect (in this case, Standard English), as well as the most effective way to provide access to command of Standard English while educating the public about the values of nonstandard…

Since literacy tests determine instruction, they should be designed to match well-defined instructional goals. They should be evaluated and implemented by those who teach literacy in consultation with other interested parties and should function to improve teaching as well as to evaluate students. Writing abilities should be measured directly or…

This analysis of peer editing techniques briefly discusses the following: (1) the advantages of peer group editing, such as the availability of a wider audience and writing models; (2) the potential disadvantages of grouping unskilled or uncommitted students; (3) forming groups; (4) using sentence combining exercises to facilitate trustbuilding;…

This booklet contains selected proceedings of the 1979 conference entitled "Competency Testing and Beyond: Improving Student Writing" held in Albany, New York. Topics covered in the 17 selections are: the "real" world and the teaching of English, what has been learned about competency testing in writing, the composing process, diagnosing student…

As one of five modules focusing on writing skills, this module on proofreading, composing, and editing is intended for use in a one-semester course on written communication or as a supplement to other courses where written communication skills are included. Designed for both teacher-directed and individualized learning situations, this module…

Teaching poetry and fiction writing is most effective in classes where the student population is heterogeneous. The experienced writers help the beginners improve and the beginners provide a critical audience for the more advanced writers. Diversity in age and worldliness challenges the creative writing instructor to provide the opportunity for…

Writing can be taught most effectively when teachers build the disorienting characteristics of reading literature into the inventive stages (prewriting and revision) of writing literary interpretations. The reading of literature and the process of composing interpretive essays are both different and similar. They are similar because they are both…

The teaching of writing in the American Indian-English bilingual classroom is hampered in that most Amerindian languages have only recently been alphabetized. There are two problems: (1) What standard or orthography will be adopted? (2) What standards of style will be developed? Usually, there are several different writing systems for any one…

Magazines and comic strips are two readily available cultural artifacts that can be used by expository writing teachers. Magazines are a particularly rich source of referential material for the composition classroom, offering examples of various prose styles and formal structures. One possibility for using magazines in writing classes is a…

This report is one of a series of papers presented to a continuing in-house seminar on learning sponsored by the Ford Foundation. The paper reports on several schools where writing and individual expression are valued, identifies one approach to the teaching of writing, and addresses two central questions underlying the crisis of writing in the…

This study examines eight evaluative abstracts on grammar instruction, to determine the effects of such instruction on student writing and to trace the development of sentence-combining instruction, which helps students write with increased syntactic maturity. On the basis of the evaluative abstracts, the study concludes that traditional grammar…

One hundred seventy-five first-year community college students enrolled in a course called "Developmental Writing 090" participated in this study. Some students were enrolled in an experimental group which was divided into two subgroups: one group was involved in independent study and the other in small group instruction. Other students in the…

The purpose of this study was to obtain information on the attitudes held by corporate executives and college professors toward the importance of proposal writing ability. Based on a survey of executives and professors, an inspection of the literature on proposal writing, and informal conversations with business executives and former students, it…