An assignment for high school or college students that requires them to interpret what a poem may have communicated to the poet's contemporaries can be valuable in that it teaches them that there is more than one way to interpret a poem and that the rules of interpretation are neither universal nor unchanging. Such an approach to poetry…

AN ANALYSIS OF "T-UNITS" (THE MINIMAL TERMINABLE SYNTACTIC UNITS ALLOWED BY THE GRAMMAR OF ENGLISH), AS FOUND IN CHILDREN'S WRITING, IS A MORE SENSITIVE MEASURE OF GROWTH OF SYNTACTIC SKILL THAN TRADITIONAL CRITERIA. HUNT'S 1965 COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF CLASSROOM WRITING OF FOURTH-, EIGHTH-, AND 12TH-GRADE CHILDREN, AND OF MAGAZINE…

AN ILLUSTRATED SET OF AFRICAN ANIMAL TALES HAS BEEN SELECTED AND LINGUISTICALLY STRUCTURED FOR PRACTICE IN WRITING ENGLISH COMPOSITION. FIRST USED BY FOREIGN STUDENTS AT TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, AND BY SIXTH-GRADE STUDENTS (NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH) IN MASSACHUSETTS, THESE MATERIALS ARE NOW BEING USED BY VARIOUS GROUPS IN THE…

THE DESIGN OF THIS COURSE WAS BASED ON THE BELIEF THAT GOOD DISCUSSION IS A WAY TO INCREASE UNDERSTANDING. ALTHOUGH THE COURSE IS PRESENTED IN DETAILED FORM, LIKE A SYLLABUS, IT WAS NOT INTENDED BY THE AUTHORS TO BE RIGIDLY FOLLOWED LIKE A SCHEDULE BUT, INSTEAD, TO BE USED AS A FRAMEWORK TO HELP THE TEACHER IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF A DISCUSSION…

THE EFFECT OF KNOWLEDGE OF GENERATIVE GRAMMAR UPON COMPOSITION SKILLS WAS INVESTIGATED. GENERATIVE GRAMMAR DESCRIBES THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESS OF PRODUCING SENTENCES. IN THIS STUDY, GENERATIVE GRAMMAR WAS TAUGHT TO NINTH- AND TENTH-GRADE STUDENTS. SEVERAL SPECIFIC QUESTIONS GUIDED THE STUDY--CAN HIGH SCHOOL PUPILS LEARN TO APPLY THE RULES OF A…

IN ORDER TO ENHANCE THE SPEAKING ABILITY OF THE STUDENT, TO HELP HIM DEVELOP READING AND WRITING SKILLS, AND TO AID HIM IN ACQUIRING BETTER TECHNIQUES IN SPANISH, SUGGESTIONS ARE MADE TO THE TEACHER REGARDING THE USE OF THIS VOLUME. SUCH SUGGESTIONS INCLUDE CHORAL AND DOUBLE REPETITION, A READING OF MATERIAL PREVIOUSLY MEMORIZED, AND A VARIED…

CONTROLLED CLASSROOM EXPERIMENTS ATTEMPTED TO ESTABLISH A BASIS FOR EVALUATING THE COMPARATIVE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE WRITING ACT ITSELF, DRILL ON USAGE AND MECHANICS, SELF-INSTRUCTION, GROUP DISCUSSION, THEME CORRECTION AND CRITICISM, AND IMMEDIATE TUTORIAL FEEDBACK. EXPERIMENTS WERE CONDUCTED WITH ALMOST 300 STUDENTS IN GRADES 8 THROUGH 12. IT WAS…

THIS IS THE REPORT OF A COMMITTEE WHICH IDENTIFIED FIVE STUDIES WHICH IN ITS OPINION WERE SOUNDLY BASED UPON CONTROLLED EXPERIMENTATION AND TEXTUAL ANALYSIS. THE FIVE STUDIES ARE BRIEFLY SUMMARIZED AND THE IMPLICATIONS OF EACH FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF TEACHING ENGLISH COMPOSITION ARE PRESENTED. (JK)

THE PRIMARY OBJECTIVE WAS TO TEST THE HYPOTHESIS THAT WRITING PROFICIENCY IMPROVES AS WRITING FREQUENCY INCREASES. THE SECONDARY OBJECTIVE WAS TO ESTABLISH A CORRELATION BETWEEN GRAMMATICAL AND MECHANICAL ACCURACY AND THE ABILITY TO WRITE WELL. TO THIS END, 6 EXPERIMENTAL COLLEGE FRESHMAN SECTIONS WERE ESTABLISHED, EACH 2 SECTIONS WRITING 20, 8,…

Holistic evaluation is a reliable, valid, and cost-effective alternative to the usual mechanical assessment of writing. Writing samples are scored on a five-point scale against an overall impression of development, organization, and coherentness. The method was applied to the Communication Activities Skills Project (CASP) for grades 3-12. Writing…

A unit is described for teaching audience analysis in a high school expository writing course. The five main sections of the unit are (1) an analysis of audience as part of writing, (2) the writer as a decision maker, (3) testing audience reaction during the composing process, (4) post-communication audience reaction assessment, and (5)…

Since good prose is usually prose that has been carefully edited, devoting a significant portion of class time to editing should improve the writing and attitudes toward writing of college students in expository writing classes. By requiring students to edit their essays in class, writing teachers force the students to break their writing into a…

Misleading headings in documents, which make it hard for readers to find what they need, are common in many types of documents. A review of research on the importance of cues in the reading process suggests that heading miscues might seriously impair understanding. Three experiments were conducted to discover how headings cue or miscue adult…

Specifying and writing appropriate items for student writing assessments is an exacting task. All too frequently, however, teachers approach this task by reading a skill statement and hurriedly writing a few items with correct answers combined with several distractors. This approach disregards the essentials of isolating a single skill for…

This study investigates the relationship between reading comprehension and eleven measures of syntactic writing maturity. The subjects were 144 third, fourth, and fifth grade students of the Travis Elementary School in Sulphur Springs, Texas. The two instruments used to collect data were an in-class composition, which provided a writing sample,…