In an attempt to improve its students' writing abilities, as well as their critical thinking skills, Lord Fairfax Community College, in Virginia, developed a program called "Thinking through Writing." The project designers believed that concept formation, classification, memory enhancement, and other learning/thinking skills could be…

Based on a teacher's 14 years of experience in teaching writing, this manual was developed to help General Educational Development (GED) teachers to guide adults to improve their writing ability in preparation for the GED test. The manual is organized in four sections. The first section is a discussion of frequent concerns and problems that…

A study examined the effect of a computer network which was designed to create a functional learning environment to engage students in writing as a communicative act with a real audience. Subjects, 44 seventh-grade Israeli students, wrote an essay as part of their regular midterm examination and, a week later, wrote another essay for their peers,…

A summer intensive English language course is described that is offered by the Chulalongkorn University Language Institute (CULI) in Thailand to university instructors and government officials. A writing program, which constitutes one-fourth of the entire course, consists of 10 units incorporating main functions and topics of English use found in…

A course in Commercial Spanish at West Chester University in Pennsylvania is described that incorporates computer networking and a writing emphasis. Students use word processing and electronic mail to facilitate writing assignments, with the E-Mail function managed through the university's computing center. The 20 students in the class included…

A practicum was developed to improve process writing skills of seventh grade at-risk students by increasing interest through the use of the microcomputer, word processing software, and telecommunications technology. Sixteen students wrote a series of eight "basic" hand-written essays as part of the regular language arts class. Students then…

Using the newspaper to provide opportunities for students to learn current events and further develop writing skills is described. Seven activities outline how to use cooperative learning to teach current events. Four types of assignments based on newspapers develop various types of writing skills: (1) personal writing; (2) descriptive writing;…

The 161 tests cited in this bibliography are for all age and grade levels. Many of the instruments are test batteries in which writing skills are measured in a subtest. The tests may contain objective, multiple-choice or essay-type questions. The tests included here are in English and for native-speakers. This document is one in a series of…

This catalog is a checklist that provides an overview of objectives that can be explored in an adult literacy program. It is intended to (1) help instructors form a quick idea of what students already know; (2) show learners that they already do know a great deal; and (3) help learners and instructors plan the program ahead by making a selection…

The responses of four scholars in the field of second language education to questions about language anxiety in second language learners are presented. The four respondents were Stephen Krashen, Alice Omaggio Hadley, Tracy Terrell, and Jennybelle Rardin. The formats of the interviews included telephone interviews on questions presented beforehand,…

In 1983, Charles County Community College (CCCC) initiated a project to infuse academic information from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences into developmental courses. The reorganization assignments related to 27 topics that promoted academic examination and cultural literacy while at the same time drawing from students' own…

Everyone sees through advertisements, yet no one is immune from their appeal. In a writing class the students were able to look at ads without being injured or seduced by them, but doubted that others could do the same. It is important to encourage students to discuss what they actually think about writings rather than what they are supposed to…

A Francis Christensen-oriented, "generative rhetoric" 12-step approach to sentence skills was used in two English-as-a-second-language composition courses at Wichita (Kansas) State University in 1980. The classes consisted of approximately 50% Middle Eastern students, 35% Southeast Asian students, and 15% African and South American students. Two…

Basic writing (BW) programs and teachers are often victims of the various political systems of academia. Administrators seldom devote energy or funds to BW programs and expend little effort to secure qualified faculty for them. BW courses are most frequently taught by part-time faculty, largely in unsupervised situations and without a common…

A curriculum for intermediate composition for students of English as a second language is presented based on the use of levels of specificity as an organizing principle. The course objective is for students to write well-planned, coherent paragraphs acceptable to the American academic audience, within limited formats. Two additional fundamentals…