The aim of this review is to identify and examine the rhetorical features, conventions, and sociocultural contexts that students engage when they enter an academic discourse community. The review seeks to identify and analyze the intertextual relationships between teacher/authority recommendations and the development of student autonomy and voice…

This booklet presents a qualitative evaluation of the Simi Star Project, which sought to demonstrate the use of a Writing to Read adaptation that supports a literature-based, whole language, writing process environment within kindergarten and first-grade classrooms. After a description of the questions that the evaluation asked, the booklet…

This paper describes the kinds of talk that children in three different preschools typically experience during storybook read-alouds and other interactions with print. The paper situates these experiences within everyday classroom life and describes the ways these contrasting experiences may be related to the development of literacy and literary…

This report describes the second phase of a study of the transformations students make in their written texts as they write from sources in a given discipline. Phase 1 of the study examined how students performed the task of writing a critique of a scholarly article in sociology and how their efforts were evaluated by professors in the discipline.…

Springing from a series of weekly conversations with five second-year teachers in a university writing program, this book presents reflections on some of the questions about teaching that emerged from those conversations. The book is divided into three sections. The first section, "Taking It Personally," examines how the feelings,…

A study examined the difference in writing competency achievement between classes taught by full-time faculty and classes taught by adjunct faculty, and whether student ratings of the course and the quality of instruction differed. Subjects were 1,339 students in all 49 classes taught by 11 full-time and 23 adjuncts in the Fall semesters of 1991…

Writing to Read (WTR), a project of the International Business Machine Corporation (IBM), is a language development program designed to facilitate reading, writing, listening and speaking skills of kindergarten and first grade students. This paper reports on an evaluation of WTR in a large suburban school district in Georgia seeking answers to the…

Throughout the early years of the twentieth century, literacy education was based on the solid understanding of grammar. Yet as early as 1923, empirical data indicated that the link between knowledge of grammar and correct use of English was tenuous at best. Despite formidable evidence, some educators still advocate the use of grammar as a…

This final report from the Center for the Study of Writing, which, over the past 5 years, has engaged in a program of research aimed at understanding how written language is acquired and how it can best be taught, is in three main sections. The first section (Executive Summary) summarizes the Center's major findings related to each problem area…

A study examined the subtle impact of word processing (used alone) on the way students approach their writing tasks. Nine elementary school teachers were trained in techniques of naturalistic observation and received a kit containing important guidelines for their observational task, daily log sheets, and journal forms. The teachers then observed…

An informal study explored the difficulties of writing teachers who are asked to set aside preferred ways of viewing student writing for state-mandated criteria when serving as evaluators for state-mandated tests, such as Florida's College Level Academic Skills Test (CLAST). Twelve high school, community college, and university-level writing…

To examine the potential role of teacher-student interactions in the teaching and learning of written language, a study analyzed the writing conference interaction between a teacher and four separate college students: one high achieving Caucasian, one high achieving Asian American, one low achieving Caucasian, and one low achieving Asian American.…

A study investigated the effects of preteaching vocabulary on students' performance of a writing task targeted to the use of those words. Subjects were 50 fourth grade and 55 sixth grade students. Materials included a pretest narrative writing assignment, a 10-word vocabulary pretest and posttest, a vocabulary instructional booklet with teacher's…

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…

Materials pertinent to a study that surveyed and interviewed writing faculty and staff of the 19 campuses of The California State University are assembled in this volume. Various sections of the volume contain (1) a faculty questionnaire, (2) a campus fact sheet, (3) interview protocols for department chair and program coordinators, (4) a taxonomy…