Elementary school students are unfamiliar with the process of writing a report on an assigned topic. One strategy for rectifying this is to have students compose reports in groups. Group compositions are a collaborative effort to prepare a piece of writing whereby students in either large or small groups work through the writing process together…

Effective writing assessment involves judging how well a writer is encouraged by the classroom's social context to pull together ideas and to bring experience to bear on abstractions. Four main points can be made to justify this view. First, assessment by standardized test determines a teach-and-test model of instruction. But a curriculum that…

Freshman composition students were given six assignments designed to help them examine, analyze, and put their memories into context so that the students could use their memories to begin exploring and creating their own "truths" through language. Two essential types of memory were identified: (1) natural memory, memorizing word for word, which…

The report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress entitled "Poor Writing Performance Blamed on Scant Writing Practice" makes it clear that little progress has been made in the improvement of students' writing. This is true in part because the conditions for teaching writing are unsatisfatory. The time has come to undertake a…

A study evaluated the effectiveness of a teacher-researcher program begun in the Fort Worth Indpendent School District to improve and assess students' writing abilities. The study sought to determine if there was a noticeable improvement in the writing skills of students studying with the teacher-researchers as opposed to students studying with…

Questions raised by the misinterpretations evidenced in the final examination essays of a freshman English class should lead teachers to a new understanding of how the phrasing of writing assignments influences what students write. Some of the questions included: (1) How detailed must an assignment be to communicate its goals? (2) What type of…

The teaching of writing to students who speak nonstandard English can be difficult because students' linguistic differences rarely indicate true incompetence, and students' writing problems may result from conflicts between the cultures and language uses at home and school. Factors found to encourage writing improvement are the following: (1)…

To shift the focus away from the writing instructor as the primary audience for written compositions, these writing assignments address the issue of audience directly. The assignments include the following: (1) select a magazine and analyze its audience; (2) compose a letter to the editor; (3) write an article for the selected magazine about an…

The English department at the University of Cincinnati recently initiated an experimental writing course for developmental students who used Apple IIc computers and the Bank Street Writer (BSW) word processing program. BSW was chosen because of its overall simplicity, efficiency, and accessibility. The first two weeks of the course consisted of…

Comparing the effectiveness of several comprehensive computer-assisted writing tools, this final report on the Writing Tools Project evaluates five IBM programs--"Writer's Workbench" (WWB), "HBJ Writer,""Rightwriter,""UNC-CH Write," and "Writing Is Thinking"--and two Macintosh…

An action research project was undertaken to understand how the Writing Laboratory at Reading Area Community College (RACC) defines and accomplishes its work, what faculty and students expect of the lab, and how they make use of it. The investigation sought to foster discussion and reflection on the appropriate role and staffing of a college…

The teaching activities presented in this document focus on teaching students the language of mathematics through reading and writing. The first activity teaches students about space, time, numbers, and languages by having them give directions to a robot, compare distances traveled, read a map, and write a story with illustrations about a robot.…

A study analyzed the revision practices of 25 children in a third grade classroom, half of whom received LOGO instruction, to determine if the revision practices inherent in LOGO programing sponsor revision practices in the composing of autonomous texts of young children. It was hypothesized that the revision strategies in LOGO, both engendered…

Discussions of audience, such as those by Russell Long, Carol Berkenkotter, David Park, Lisa Ede, and Andrea Lunsford, most often do not utilize the research by speech rhetoricians to whom the question of audience has always been central. Chaim Perelman's conception of the "universal audience" and traditional, speech-oriented rhetoric…

The use of a model of an effective inservice program developed in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, revealed that in order to provide better inservice programs for experienced teachers, the programs should be an assessment of the needs and professional concerns of the teachers as directly expressed by them. Those developing the program should insist on…