Some of the issues involved in proficiency-oriented testing of foreign language listening, reading, and writing skills-- language modalities paid less attention currently than oral skills-- are examined. These general issues are discussed: What is proficiency?; the relationship of the four modalities and proficiency testing; proficiency testing v.…

Two methods of outlining are suggested for college-level students of English as a second language (ESL) who need the tools to master rhetorical patterns of academic written English that may be very different from those in their native languages. The two outlining techniques separate the four logically distinct tasks in the process of outlining:…

Seventeen art activities are suggested for use in the intermediate-level class of English as a second language to review specific grammar points, provide conversation practice, and improve writing skills. In these art activities, students create their own visual aids and use them for a variety of language activities, such as: creating a family…

When using outside sources in their writing, students must learn to balance efficiency with effectiveness. In other words, they must express themselves clearly and quickly, providing readers with enough explicit information to create a causal chain based on reasonable inferences. Yet they must guard against being overly explicit, boring their…

Designed for use by those administrative personnel in local school districts who are responsible for preparing written releases of the district's educational quality assessment (EQA), this booklet contains aids and suggestions for making the release more effective. Each section of the booklet deals with a different aspect of writing the EQA,…

The fact that students have not learned to listen may be the reason some of them cannot write. Listening is an active process requiring the same skills of prediction, hypothesizing, checking, revising, and generalization that reading and writing demand. The following three exercises were designed to make students conscious of themselves as active…

An assignment given to students at the end of an advanced composition class empowers students by helping them grasp principles and develop abilities that allow them to get beyond needing teachers. The crux of the assignment is a heuristic for analyzing any particular type of writing for the purpose of learning to produce it. The students are…

A number of issues must be considered if those in the profession are to construct a theoretically and pedagogically sound definition of literacy as a word and a concept. The profession agrees that literacy is the encoding and decoding of meaning, but there is little agreement on the term "meaning." Sociolinguists define literacy as a cluster of…

Guidelines are offered for helping gifted high school students present oral and written presentations of individual learning projects. Students need to work toward a goal and accept responsibility for presenting the project formally. Written reports foster discipline, completed projects, and documentation for further study. Verbal reports offer…

A major goal in teaching basic writers is to show them the importance of revision in the writing process, specifically revision for correctness (correcting), for creating content (adding), and for cutting out inessential material (subtracting). Revising for correctness includes varying or limiting the assigned revision tasks, varying the length of…

The keeping of journals by students in the basic speech course is the focus of this paper, which is divided into three parts. Part 1 examines the benefits of journal use to students and teachers and points out that three types of learning can thus be encouraged: the development of thinking skills, personal growth, and content learning. It also…

Using student dictated stories to create class books is an exciting way to teach young children about books and writing. Children can thus use their own material as they learn to read, the books provide a class library, and writing through dictation allows young children to learn about reading and writing before they can read or write--even with…

In preparation for adding an essay test to the General Educational Development (GED) test, the GED Testing Service undertook a series of studies to establish (1) whether acceptable reading reliabilities were attainable in decentralized holistic scoring sessions often involving no more than a dozen papers; (2) whether essay readers in a variety of…

Helping first graders develop writing skills is the focus of this paper. The first part of the paper discusses 11 ideas likely to be crucial to any first grade writing program, such as the similarities between learning to talk and writing, and the teacher as the model writer. The second part of the paper outlines creative writing activities…

A study was conducted to determine if changes in a student's writing and speaking skills over the period of a semester could be measured reliably and to measure what changes, if any, occur in these skills over this period. A pretest-posttest design employing the speech and writing portions of ACT's College Outcome Measures Project was used to…