Created to offer staff development to local school districts and instructors of preservice teachers in Texas, this guide explains how to design a successful intervention program that provides short-term, intensive, one-on-one instruction for children who need help with reading and writing. In these materials, participants will learn about…

This paper discusses a first-year, second-semester composition course that develops thinking, reading, and writing skills both on an individual and on a group level; it is designed to enhance research and writing skills developed in the first-semester course. With this and the departmental course requirements in mind, according to the paper, the…

This report describes a program for improving students' writing skills in the areas of mechanics and organization through the implementation of a Writer's Workshop. The targeted population consists of fourth and fifth grade students in a Midwestern community located outside of a major city. Evidence for the existence of this problem is shown…

For students who live and study at a branch campus of a mid-sized state university in southwest Pennsylvania, the 30 miles between them and their parent university represents a geographic gulf. No courier carries mail or deliveries between the main campus and the branches, and as a result, students at the branches have no access to the campus…

Writer's Workshop is a program that teaches children the conventions of writing. Students not only learn proper grammar and punctuation; they also come to learn and value the importance of drafting, revising, and editing their pieces of writing. Writer's Workshop is a process that needs to be consistent. It is composed of three parts. The first…

This longitudinal study followed 10 beginning teachers from their last year of preservice education into their first two years of full-time teaching. Using sociocultural theory as a theoretical framework, it describes how these teachers appropriated a set of pedagogical tools for teaching writing. Data sources included approximately five…

This paper examines a program that teaches writing skills to students in an administration-preparation program. The program is broadly aimed at strengthening writing instruction and raising the level of writing competency among students in all departmental programs. The examination focuses on gaining a better understanding of the faculty's views…

This report describes a program for enriching language use in writing. The targeted population consisted of one classroom of fourth grade students in a public elementary school. This school is in the small rural community near a large city in the Midwest. The problem of lack of language skills in writing was documented with teacher and student…

Family Message Journals, in which first-graders write to their families and receive a daily written reply, involve families in children's school literacy program. This paper focuses on the written replies of four representative case-study families to their children's messages. Analysis of the instructional functions realized through text structure…

A researcher examined the numbers of relative clauses and the percentages of subordinate clauses that relative clauses comprise in two sets of research reports (one set from the period 1893-1901 and the other from 1980) about spectroscopy from the "Physical Review." He analyzed some striking differences between the sets in patterns of…

This book transforms William Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night,""A Midsummer Night's Dream," and "Much Ado about Nothing" into adaptable "Caught'ya" sentences that appeal to high school students at any level--from basic skills and dropout prevention through high honors and advanced placement. The book makes…

Recent books and scholarly journals directed to English composition teachers reveal something like conceptual chaos, a Babel of mutually unintelligible academic tongues. "New Professional Compositionism" has taken a fundamentally wrong view of the relationship between knowledge (including theoretical knowledge) and practice. An…

The purpose of this dissertation was to develop a profile of writing centers in 12 community colleges governed by the Tennessee Board of Regents, including information on how the centers were established, funding and staffing sources, services provided, constituency demographic information, professional staff development, and the use of electronic…

This portfolio book provides an actual step-by-step complete system of writing assessment from the ground up and across all grade levels. The book suggests that teachers purposefully gather student portfolios, reflect meaningfully on them, and then validly and reliably rate them with statistical success that will also feed meaningfully back into…

A study investigated the working relationship between writing program directors and writing center directors nationally, to develop a picture of such a relationship and to compare the nature and status of the two positions and the backgrounds of the people who hold them. In all, about 650 surveys were distributed to members of professional…