This article describes the Early Braille Readers Project, which provided a Mountbatten Pro Brailler and peripheral equipment to 20 kindergarteners, first-, and second graders in Texas. The project included training and support in the form of site visits and teacher training for both teachers of students with visual impairments and classroom…

This article is a report on the 2006 WAC Conference at Clemson University, written from the perspective of two international "critical friends." We use our reflections on the conference as a springboard for exploring the current state of play of the WAC movement, and for suggesting future areas for development. We noted three common sets…

This book follows master educator Elizabeth (Betty) Jones as she teaches an introductory course in early childhood education. She actively engages the students, encouraging them to make decisions, ask questions, and engage in collaborative problem solving--herself modeling the behaviors that should be practiced by adults working with young…

Most children know they should not pollute but have never considered why. One elementary school teacher creates a lesson for third- through fifth-grade students that makes the connection concrete. In the lesson, students consider the possible effects a trash item would have on an animal and its habitat, identifying ways in which the piece of trash…

This paper reports a longitudinal quasiexperimental study that investigated the effectiveness of a theme-based syllabus versus an essentially grammatical syllabus with functional elements for young Turkish learners of English (aged 10-11) in a primary school setting. The theme-based syllabus rested on two different theoretical premises, one being…

The authors examine how to assess multimodal reading practices with a group of middle school students attending an elementary school in Eastern Canada. They argue that to assess new reading practices, we need a fine-grained account of what students do, when they do it, with whom, why they do it, and finally, where they go in web space. The authors…

To be actively involved in their own writing requires that students make decisions. In order to build a new approach for our Technical/Professional Writing classes, we assessed our individual teaching practices and past experiences, studied current scholarship on teaching writing, and conducted research on technical writing in our local community.…

There is considerable concern that the majority of adolescents do not develop the competence in writing they need to be successful in school, the workplace, or their personal lives. A common explanation for why youngsters do not write well is that schools do not do a good job of teaching this complex skill. In an effort to identify effective…

In two sections of a world history class, 43 sixth graders, all considered competent readers, participated in two sets of tasks. First, they used a familiar textbook to locate the answers to six questions, all of which contained terms that could be found in the book's index. Second, they participated in a report-writing project in which they were…

A multilingual basic writing course is an ideal laboratory for language learning for both second language students and native English speakers. This latter group at Bronx Community College (New York), which is located in a poor, minority urban community, are generally English-as-a-Second-Dialect (ESD) students. What one instructor tries to do is…

This is an in-process report on over 100 English-as-a-Foreign-Language argumentative compositions written by Spanish university students in first and fourth year philology. The project aim was to compare writing development over 4 years in a cross-sectional design. As data were collected, factors other than developmental stages began to appear,…

Designed to take students on a guided tour of entire research projects, from developing interests and focusing ideas to producing finished papers, through the experiences of five students, this book also provides exhaustive coverage of research mechanics. Checklists throughout the book (and indexed inside the front cover) allow students to review…

A study investigated the effectiveness of teaching formal grammar and grammatical structures on development of writing skills of learners of English as a Second Language (ESL), and examined possible differences between males and females in this regard. Subjects were 97 university ESL students, 48 males and 49 females enrolled in a school of…

Integrating up-to-date composition theory with pedagogical research in critical thinking and inquiry, this book presents a flexible organizational structure to accommodate a range of freshman composition course designs and to engage students intellectually in problem-centered writing activities to prepare them for academic tasks across the…

This partial proceedings contains papers presented at the fifth annual conference of the Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on the topic of learning, teaching, and researching grammar. Papers in the proceedings are: "Using Grammatical Information to Make Rhetorical Points (Wanda Van Goor); "Grammar with a Purpose: Using Grammar…