Because of their egocentricity, many students have a limited sense of other cultures and are caught up in a web of ethnocentric biases without quite knowing how and why these biases exist. A framework, encompassing the theories of J. Moffett and J. Piaget, may be designed to move students through a series of hierarchical writing exercises that…

If students are first taught writing as experience, then become aware of the intellectual and imaginative operations they use to shape that experience, they will be better able to manage the thinking and writing tasks of the various academic disciplines and of the world of work. This is the purpose of a proposed upper-level writing course that…

Having students adapt a play from a strongly dramatic short story through the composing process is a natural and powerful way to integrate the language arts. Using dramatic activities in the classroom naturally leads to two kinds of language activities: receptive (listening and observing), and active (discussing, reading, writing, and presenting).…

Although workshops and a study by the English Department of the University of Montevallo (Alabama) led to the conclusions that writing should be taught from a process model and that writing consciousness needed to be raised throughout the curriculum, these conclusions did not adequately address several issues: (1) process is a teaching philosophy,…

Although the focus of this issue of the "Virginia English Bulletin" is on making effective assignments, most of the articles also emphasize the importance and power of writing. Articles deal with the following topics: (1) the use of I-search (as explained by Kenneth Macrorie in "Searching Writing") as a form of research paper…

The Administrative Writing Program developed at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) has served both the administrators and the writing staff that offers it. Using course material that comes from UCLA office files, the program teaches writing as an administrative act, focusing on four topics: the written product, the writing process,…

Recognizing the need to assess the long term effects of composition instruction, a study was conducted to determine whether students could remember significant aspects of a writing course up to two years later, to discern their assessment of the effects of the course on their subsequent writing attitudes, and to solicit suggestions based on…

One year after sixth grade students participated in an instructional intervention experiment aimed at teaching reflective planning skills in writing, a followup study focused on evidence of reflectivity in attitudes and metacognitive knowledge concerning writing. This study was conducted with 16 experimental and 13 control students. Data were…

A study was conducted to examine children's developing perceptions of contextual factors surrounding their writing at home and at school. Subjects were 20 children from grades one through five, who wrote in a wide range of contexts. Children's writing products for three months were labeled for ownership, setting, audience, purpose, and genre,…

With particular focus on the need to provide a practical, systematic introduction to the concept of sentence combining and to the signals used to control the various combining operations, this paper provides detailed specifications for including sentence combining as part of a comprehensive plan for teaching the composing process. The…

Because of dramatic changes in the technology of communication systems in business, industry, government, and the professions, college graduates are no longer writing the way they were taught to write. Instead of being physically engaged in a recursive pen-in-hand process, they are dictating their communications for word processing systems. A…

Teachers read student papers with both eager and anxious expectancy about discourse they have caused but not written. Whatever the teachers may have said about what they will look for as they read, they still measure each paper against their ideas about appropriate performances in each of the categories of textual analysis. They are not reacting…

To determine staging points reached in written narratives based on the personal experience of four secondary school students, researchers examined (1) the kinds of ordering or reordering that occur as the writer imaginatively recovers the events of the past; (2) whether the writer automatically assumes or takes for granted that a reader is already…

Included in these proceedings are 11 essays by 12 specialists in the field of writing center administration. The first essay is the keynote address; the other essays are printed in the order in which they were presented at the conference. The papers discuss the following: (1) the writing center: a vision revisited; (2) from thought to word:…

A two-year study investigated writing in the elementary school. Data collected included field notes from observation of a second/third grade classroom, videotapes of selected classroom activities, weekly journals kept by the teacher reflecting her thoughts on teaching in general and on writing in particular, interviews with the teacher about the…