The current study compared the effects of hand raising and response cards during a writing instruction class in a middle-school resource classroom with students who were learning English as their second language. Response cards increased the rate and accuracy of academic responding, increased weekly quiz scores, and had mixed effects on off-task…

With the current focus on writing across the curriculum and the emphasis on schoolwide writing programs, perhaps library media specialists should consider adding writing instruction to the learning that takes place in the library media center. The teaching of writing should be a natural extension of the teaching of information literacy. Both…

Because students in online distance courses use e-mail (a hot medium) to communicate, their messages often are filled with emotion, causing problems for teachers. This article describes the kinds of messages that men and women write and suggests strategies for course design to help defuse some of the emotion.

Elaine O'Connor teaches at Clark Elementary School and is creating a literacy program that provides the children with nearly daily opportunities to read and write. Her program focuses on two values, the drafts that provide writers with an opportunity to think, and the response to writers, which focuses on what they know of the content.

A case study examined the collaborative experiences of students in an online business writing classroom. The purpose was to examine the same groups of students working on collaborative writing assignments in both a synchronous (real-time) and an asynchronous (non-real-time) discussion forum. This study focused on examining the amount, pattern, and…

Children usually improve their writing in response to teacher comments. HARRY is a computer tutor, designed to assist children improve their narrative writing, focusing particularly upon grammar and style. Providing assistance involved identifying aspects of grammar and style on which to concentrate, including ways to enable the computer to detect…

A study of writing by high school seniors and first-year college students found that classroom conditions were a large factor in student improvement. Larger class sizes in high school and less time devoted strictly to writing were the chief detriments to improvement in the seniors' writing.

A community college teacher emphasizes the dynamic aspects of language correctness and helps his students understand that achieving correctness is not simply a matter of following a set of rules. His students write letters and speeches in which they demonstrate the relationships among language, power, purpose, and audience.

Mastering sentence-construction skills is essential to learning to write. Limited sentence-construction skills may hinder a writer's ability to translate ideas into text. It may also inhibit or interfere with other composing processes, as developing writers must devote considerable cognitive effort to sentence construction. The authors examined…

This article documents aspects of the history of support for scholarship by two professional organizations involved with teaching composition at the postsecondary level: the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Evidence is found that for the past two decades, the two…

Writing instruction in the United States now routinely takes place in networked environments. For adult learners in open admissions institutions, the literacy demands of the academic sphere and the public nature of the acts of writing in networked environments can create alienating experiences. This study examined the possibilities that the genre…

Although computer-mediated discussions (CMDs) have the potential to be ideal forums for fostering dialogue, research on listservs and in college composition classes has found that the discourse tends to be dominated by a few individuals, often men, and is sometimes abusive. In contrast, results of our study in a teacher education course revealed…

Describes an instructor's analysis of students' responses to an assignment to describe the events of September 11, 2001 for a visual and media literacy course. Discusses the impact of media reports on students' perceptions of those events, and the inability of most students to critically analyze the situation because of the absence of personal…

One way to resolve some of the conflict in English studies and technical communication over their diminishing cultural capital is to recognize the place of instrumental discourse in communication studies. Instrumental discourse is individually verified social agreements to coordinate and control physical actions. One purpose of literary works is…

The author has taught a distance education version of the undergraduate technical communication service course at Boise State University since 1997 and shares the strategies he has found to decrease the time instructors spend teaching online, thereby enabling them to use the time they do have to enhance their students' online experience. These…