The writing center at Bluefield State College (West Virginia) is called the SPICE Center, SPICE being an acronym for Self Paced Instruction for Competency in English. In addition to emphasizing skill acquisition and flexibility, it stresses face-to-face evaluation of written work, and places heavy emphasis on writing as process instead of writing…

An approach to writing for high school and college students is presented in this brief article. AUTHOR'S COMMENT (excerpt): The science fiction course I teach is an elective that enrolls about fifty students per class. Ninety percent or more of the students are not English majors and have done little writing in the recent past. Assigning frequent…

Attempting to place in an American context many of the ideas about the teaching of writing that were first developed in England, this book contains contributions from internationally prominent teachers/scholars who attended the New York University-CBS Sunrise Semester course on learning to write and writing to learn. The text also reflects the…

Prepared as part of a series applying recent research in oral and written communication to classroom practice, this booklet reviews a number of concepts and issues important to communication assessment. The first section of the booklet discusses several issues related to assessing communication at both district and classroom levels. Issues…

Reflecting concerns for the present state of and current trends in English education on an international scope, the articles in these conference proceedings focus on the multicultural environment, teacher education, and research in English instruction. Following an opening address on the past and future of English teaching, the remaining articles…

Useful for writing teachers at all levels, this monograph explores the nature of writing apprehension and presents nonthreatening teaching and evaluation methods. The first section of the booklet examines theory and research on writing anxiety and its effects, along with some teaching behaviors likely to aggravate the problem. The second section…

An experiment with students in a first year college German course was carried out to study the value of free writing assignments and to discover a feasible and helpful correction method. Research in English composition methodology indicates that extensive teacher's corrective marks have a detrimental effect on a student's progress. Yet, foreign…

The authors of this essay regularly require students to engage in informal writing as a means to promote learning. One form of informal writing is the summary/reaction journal. In summary/reaction journals, students read a chapter or article, write a summary of that reading, and then react by offering their own insights and responses to the…

In 1989, a project was undertaken to improve the student success rate in a writing course (Communications I) at a Florida multi-campus institution. Of the 489 students who had taken the course, 18% were unsuccessful in completing it in one semester. Three observed student behaviors which contributed to poor writing performance were an inability to…

A study investigated the responses of students of English as a Second Language (ESL) to teachers' written comments on essay drafts. Subjects were 15 students in intensive college ESL courses. The students wrote essay drafts, which were turned in to teachers for graded comments. The students were then interviewed within three days after receiving…

The study reported in this paper attempted to find out what evidences of active learning were displayed in the "ready," i.e., prompt and appropriate responses called for in classroom oral communication. Such an inquiry leads toward the claim that the learning process itself is a suitable arena for evaluation, and thus that the evaluation…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) administered a writing task to nationally representative samples of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students in order to assess their abilities to use the conventions of written English. Approximately 2,000 students at each age level completed this task as part of NAEP's 1984 writing assessment.…

The articles in this journal issue examine the characteristics of student writing apprehension, and teaching methods to alleviate it. The titles of the articles and their authors are as follows: (1) "Writing Anxiety: Reasons and Reduction Techniques" (Helen R. Heaton and Pauline M. Pray); (2) "Writing Anxiety and the Gifted Student…

A major issue facing the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Writing Assessment is its relationship with the most frequently encountered measurement practices among State Education Agencies (SEAs) and Local Education Agencies (LEAs). Should NAEP conduct its assessments in a fashion that represents how things should be, or reflect…

To determine whether Olivet Nazarene University's standard freshman writing course requirements measure favorably with those of the majority of the 75 Christian College Coalition (CCC) members, a study compared the textbooks, papers, activities, and evaluation procedures required by each institution. Stephen Witte's "National Survey of…