Long an advocate of literature circles, Daniels recaps the history of literature circles and cautions against the "terminology drift" that labels practices as literature circles when, in fact, they are not. He offers resources that anchor best practice in this area, and discusses how the concept is evolving and expanding. He also introduces us to…

The potential of poetry for expanding possibilities in teaching, learning, and research is explored through specific examples from a poet/teacher's practice of poetry as a way of knowing and a medium for sharing knowledge.

Kindergarten teachers could help educators and researchers by creating opportunities and experiences in classroom settings to offer literacy learning. Children, however, learn literacy when immersed in classroom environments that support natural literacy experiences throughout the day.

This paper reports the findings of a longitudinal study of the literacy teaching of two teachers who were involved in a large-scale government initiative to change the way literacy is taught. These two teachers were identified at the outset of the study as being very different in ways in which they thought about the teaching of reading and…

This exploratory study investigated the effects of a structured writing strategy on the quality of expository compositions produced by 36 African-American college undergraduates with learning disabilities. The strategy was structured to assist students in developing a topic sentence and main ideas into body paragraphs, and in using transition…

This study investigates the acquisition of an unfamiliar discursive practice by an adult Vietnamese learner of English. The practice is revision talk in weekly English as a Second Language (ESL) writing conferences between the student and his ESL writing instructor. This research adopts the interactional competence framework for understanding the…

There is a strong relationship between orthographic-motor integration related to handwriting and students' ability to produce creative and well-structured written text. This relationship is thought to be due to the cognitive load which results when attention is required by writers to write letters and words on the page. Lack of automaticity in…

This article describes a course in the Department of Science Education, Tel Aviv University, that was designed to teach MA students how to prepare a research assignment in science education. Our students are in-service teachers, graduates in one of the science domains. In general, most of them lack experience in planning and writing research…

Argues that teachers in all disciplines can act as insiders in helping students to write more effectively within academic contexts. Teachers who write are even more effective because they bring expert knowledge of content and language from tacit to conscious awareness and engage themselves and their students in the teaching exchange. (Contains 13…

This article profiles a group of college students with learning disabilities, outlines strategies used to help those students in their 100-level expository-writing class, and illustrates persistent writing problems with three student writing samples. This study revealed that, even with explicit support, students whose learning disabilities had an…

Many excellent reading and writing teachers are facing important philosophical questions in their teaching. Many teachers lament that new guidelines have forced them to eliminate practices such as writing workshops, shared or guided reading, daily news, and read-alouds. The reasons why these teachers can no longer engage in these activities is…

We studied children's conceptions of the writing process while the complex cognitive activity of writing is carried out through a pictorial representation of the writing process. Sixty children attending Kindergarten, first grade and fourth grade in Bariloche, Argentina, were presented individually with a sequence of four questions about the…

Learning through writing is a way of learning not only the appropriate written expression of disciplinary knowledge, but also the knowledge itself through reflection and revision. This study investigates the quality of a writing experience provided to university students in a first-year biology subject. The writing instruction methodology used is…

Recognizing that students shudder at revision and see it as a perfunctory task to satisfy only their teachers, the author offers an approach that motivates students to revise thoughtfully without increasing teachers' reading workload. Quite simply, good writing requires less time to read than poor writing. The Numbers Approach to grading can free…

In the current study, the authors examined the effects of systematically varying the writing instructions for the written emotional disclosure procedure. College undergraduates with a trauma history and at least moderate posttraumatic stress symptoms were asked to write about (a) the same traumatic experience, (b) different traumatic experiences,…