Intended for directors and teachers in high school and college writing labs, this booklet addresses their basic concerns about lab programs and the most effective ways to help students improve their writing skills. The 29 essays are arranged under six headings: the one-to-one tutoring process, diagnosing writing problems, tutor training, choosing…

Noting that the formal split between instruction in written and oral modes of communication is a relatively recent one, this paper presents arguments against that split--at both the secondary school and the college level--and arguments for instruction in communication. The paper offers a historically based definition of communication, positing…

The suspicion that some second language learners' problems in reading can be attributed to a lack of literacy in general rather than to a lack of fluency in English per se motivated the present study. The hypothesis suggests that readers learn literacy only once and that a lack of literacy in one's first language can be more of a barrier to…

Research in secondary school composition instruction indicates that (1) emphasis on writing for the teacher-as-examiner is prevalent, (2) prewriting activities are limited, (3) there is little discussion of approaches to the topic or what information should be included, and (4) activities to help students while they are writing are almost…

The four chapters of this book move from the history, philosophy, and approaches that writing laboratories encompass to a look at the many facets of their organization before treating in detail the actual teaching process and the practical elements of writing laboratory management. Chapter one notes the growth of writing labs and discusses…

Teachers are often baffled by the inability of a number of basic writing students to use the proper connective to show relationship between sentences or phrases for coherence. Most frustrating is the teacher's inadequacy in giving definitions or explanations beyond the student's textbook descriptions of the connectives. However, a cursory…

Two studies were conducted to test Francis Christensen's theory of generative rhetoric, which maintains that students should be taught the types of sentences that they infrequently use, especially ones with nonrestrictive phrasal modifiers (participial phrases and appositives) as a way to approach invention. The first study examined the principles…

A content analysis was conducted of 17 technical writing textbooks published between 1911 and 1938 and of 3 texts published recently to determine if the early texts differ from the more recent ones in the way they define the purposes of technical writing and in their treatment of style and audience. Results showed that both sets of texts define…

Far too many students handle a research assignment through the tear and glue approach, a wholesale--though usually not quite so literal--copying of materials from books followed by a heavy handed plastering of the foreign material into their papers. Their papers are foredoomed to mediocrity or worse. By overstressing the dichotomy between critical…

Research into attitudes toward writing, still in its infancy, indicates that attitudes definitely influence growth in writing, that a writer's degree of apprehension toward writing can be measured, and that certain teaching strategies can lessen students' writing anxiety. Researchers have identified the following characteristics of writing…

A survey was undertaken to gather and record the perceptions that college writing program directors and teachers have of the goals of their writing programs, particularly freshman composition. Responses were returned by 134 writing program directors and 135 composition instructors from publicly or privately funded institutions, two-year colleges,…

A study was undertaken to determine whether participation in the Wisconsin Writing Project (WWP) could influence teacher behavior to such an extent that it affected student writing achievement. Subjects were fifth grade students in six classes taught by teachers who had attended WWP summer institutes and six classes taught by teachers who had not…

Twenty constructs about writing instruction were identified in a study during which 93 teachers responded to and free-sorted 80 statements about the teaching of writing. A latent partition analysis was applied in order to summarize the data and to make apparent the major similarities in all the teachers' categorizations. Some of the identified…

Because of recent public demand that English teachers teach students basic writing skills to prepare them for employment, a study was conducted in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to determine what kinds of writing skills employers require of their workers. One hundred and sixty-four employers of the Association of Manufacturers and Commerce were sent a…

Taking a cautious view of research into the workings of the brain, this booklet suggests that such research has merely given validity to a truth good teachers have always known: all people have two ways of thinking, a linear, logical way, and a spatial, intuitive way. It also suggests that faced with cries for "basics" in education, it…