Discusses exercises enabling teachers to help 6-year-olds complete the path to total reading and spontaneous writing. The foundation of the exercises is to help children analyze words into sounds; relate the symbols of the alphabet with the sounds using sandpaper letters; and acquire the physical ability to reproduce the letters in writing. (TJQ)

Describes one teacher's approach to process writing, a mainstay for Montessori adolescent classrooms. The premise of the method is that everyone has the natural potential to write and that the emergence of the inner voice must be nurtured by extended conferencing and revision combined with taking risks, experimenting, and continually revising.…

Describes the visual arts as a means of helping remedial reading and writing students to "see" the process of writing. Discusses the use of clay sculpting to demonstrate free-writing techniques, Venn-mobiles to demonstrate compare/contrast techniques, and wraps (felt "tortillas" and fillings) to demonstrate summary writing. (Contains 10…

Describes strategies one elementary school used to improve the reading and writing skills of a group of low-performing second-grade students, including scaffolding, modeling, needs-based instruction, book-rich environment, cross-age reading, books shared with family members, and student motivation. (PKP)

When the author and her teaching colleague assessed their 7th and 8th grade students' research papers, they realized that although the papers demonstrated proper structure, the students had not gained meaningful understanding of their topics. Although the teachers had carefully prepared students to write, they had not ensured that students had…

Students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) are required to pass the same competency exams as students enrolled in general education in order to graduate to new grade levels and to earn a high school diploma. In this study, the authors taught students with SLD a self-directed organizational strategy designed to assist them in passing the…

The growth of international online access has given rise to a new production method--international outsourcing--that has important implications for technical communication practices. Successful interactions within international outsourcing require individuals to understand how cultural factors could affect online interactions. Today's technical…

While research in international technical communication has flourished during the last 10 years, there has been little published on technical communication programs outside the United States. This article addresses this need by describing 12 representative academic technical communication programs in Germany, including Germany's first master's…

This paper aims to explore advanced ESL learners' ability to make improvements in grammatical accuracy by autonomously noticing and correcting their own grammatical errors. In the recent literature in SLA, it is suggested that classroom tasks can be used to foster autonomous language learning habits (cf. Dam 2001). Therefore, it is important to…

A class of reluctant readers and writers responded positively when topics were discussed orally before writing. As writing improved, the author of this article introduced "Coffee House"--themed settings for oral performance of student writing. After modeling her own writing, the author invited students to perform, gratified when even the most…

Student teaching in New York City on September 11, 2001, forced the author to scrap her carefully planned lessons. Instead, she designed a unit to address the urgent needs of the ninth graders in her care. In this article, the author describes the poetry unit she designed to help students deal with the grieving process and allow them a way to talk…

In this essay, the author argues for a democratized way of developing a consciousness of differences by describing two abbreviated creative writing classroom experiences with urban sixth grade middle school students during the 2002-2003 academic year. She draws on Tony Medina's (2001) claim that poetry and writing weave people and worlds together…

Inoue [Inoue, A. B. (2005). "Community-based assessment pedagogy." "Assessing Writing: An International Journal, 3", 208-238] sets up a radically experimental writing class as a kind of laboratory of assessment. He seeks to avoid the standard situation where a teacher unilaterally assesses and grades student writing, using only his or her own…

One of the difficulties secondary non-Chinese-speaking background (NCSB) learners are facing is to remember the characters learned in order to recall them when necessary. The traditional way of teaching secondary NCSB learners to remember Chinese characters is through mere repetition, e.g. writing out each single character by following its stroke…

This case study examined the learning outcomes of three learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) enrolled in different Writing for Academic Purposes courses. Of the many learning outcomes observed, some express self-perceived intrapersonal and interpersonal changes, which in previous research have been named "by-products" of…