The material collected in this workshop report offers teaching techniques for technical writing instructors at universities and junior colleges. The variety of topics indicates both the broad impact of technical writing and the many specific needs of technical writers. The workshop's discussions and papers focused on a variety of needs and…

Elementary teachers should focus attention on language activities that involve naturally the reciprocal relationships among listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Teachers need to value, use, and make useful the background and language of all students, through a Language Experience Approach (LEA) in which students dictate and write about…

The purpose of this study was to determine if developmental junior-college students' overall achievement in composition skills could be increased, and their self-concepts improved, by the use of individual teacher/student conferences. The sample used for the study consisted of 62 junior-college students enrolled in a developmental English course.…

This handbook introduces English teachers to the use of simulation games as a serious method for teaching composition, language, and literature. In the first section, separate chapters discuss the rationale for game-playing; the teacher's role in simulations and ways in which classroom interaction changes when games are used; a step-by-step…

This publication describes classroom activities that teach language arts skills through the use of newspapers and magazines. The activities, which include activities for individuals and for groups, involve students in reading and learning about numerous items in the newspaper, including comics, advertisements, editorials, news stories, and…

This paper reports on a study in which the speech and the writing of college freshmen were compared. Spoken samples were gathered from classroom discussion; written samples were taken from pieces written on the discussion material in a later class session. Spoken and written samples from an "A" student, a "B+" student, a "B" student, and a "C"…

These placement tests are designed to help teachers determine a students' Chinese reading and writing level and to place them in the appropriate grade level book in the Golden Mountain Reading Series. The tests are divided into two parts: (1) word recognition and (2) reading and writing test. (Author/CFM)

This textbook for the third grade provides a series of schoolroom situations to give pupils experiences in speaking and writing good English. The situations include child life and the heroic aspects of mature life, fairies and fairyland, and the outer world, particularly animal life. Then, each situation is considerably extended, not only that…

A study explored the relationship between oral and written patterns produced by a group of black college freshmen enrolled in remedial writing classes. Forty students were asked to produce, in formal language style, both oral and written summaries of a reading selection. The data were analyzed to determine (1) the extent to which patterns,…

This field manual for composition teachers, written by community college and University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) writing instructors, examines practical and theoretical problems and strategies associated with teaching composition. Essays in chapter I, by Ruth Mitchell and Faye Peitzman, underscore the relevance and implications of…

A study was designed (1) to test whether adult writing is superior to adult speech in terms of organization and content and (2) to assess college students' ability to discriminate between passages differing in quality. Written and spoken passages that compared and contrasted two entities were elicited from college students and adult professionals.…

Writing research has indicated that exophoric reference--features of linguistic texts that refer to the situations that surround language--are more characteristic of weak writing and possibly associated with socioeconomic status. To follow up on such research, writing samples from 114 ninth and eleventh grade students and college freshmen were…

This paper presents research on the contribution of the amount of schooling to performance in French as a second language, assessed by newly developed measures of communicative competence. Test items addressed three components of communicative competence: grammatical, sociolinguistic, and strategic. Aware of the relationship of context to…

This report summarizes the contents of the 270 secondary level basic skills improvement program plans for reading, writing, and mathematics submitted by school districts in Massachusetts to the State Department of Education. School districts developed these plans in response to the State Board of Education Policy and Regulations published in…

Following a literature review on the subjects of the decline in student writing abilities and increased student writing apprehension, this paper offers teachers information on a basic writing program that reduces writing anxiety and improves writing skills through large doses of positive reinforcement. The second section of the paper discusses the…