Comparisons of writing instruction to therapy often focus on the teacher and student interaction, yet the analogy is necessarily more extended and complicated. Compositionists should be paying attention to issues of affect and providing teachers and program administrators with a course of study that includes introductions to personality theory,…

This guide, made up of transparencies and text, offers a basis for a 2-day interactive inservice presentation on how to teach writing, to help a school district ensure that its English language arts program addresses the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) test. In addition to sections on the use of the guide and the format of the TAAS…

Sixty-five students in an undergraduate reading class wrote narratives on literacy life experiences from oral history tapes collected from interviews. Students interviewed middle and high school-level reluctant readers. In classroom workshops, the college students brainstormed about how to conduct the interviews and write the narratives. In later…

A practicum used an integrated writing approach to improve 28 third-graders' ability to write descriptive paragraphs. The program consisted of two strategies: a process approach and a step-by-step approach. Success was measured by comparing the statistics of a pretest and a posttest and through observation, computer generated worksheets, and…

This booklet discusses the "whole language" approach to language instruction, which teaches students "from whole to part" through the integration of the language processes of reading, writing, speaking, and listening with an emphasis on meaning and purpose. The booklet explains what whole language is, describes its use in the teaching/learning…

A computer-based collaborative approach to writing like the Daedalus Instructional System (DIS) can help students to learn to write for communication and to read for understanding. The DIS, created to reflect the collaborative learning philosophy, is networked, and fosters communication through reading and writing. The system provides CONTACT, an…

Presenting information from school projects, interviews, workshops, conference sessions, newsletters, conference review reports, and technological developments, this series of four project information updates reports on a variety of issues relating to student achievement. The first update reports some recent work in facilitating student…

A seven-step process helps students writing research papers distinguish between what they already know before they do any research and what they find out, and also avoids cut-and-paste, redeye, and plagiarized research papers. Students first narrate the story of the research process (which will be the structural spine of the paper) and then go…

The dialogic method of teaching, which is based on Paulo Freire's notion of dialogue as the "sealing power" in the writing classroom, encourages critical thinking and interaction, and should take a more prominent place in composition classrooms. According to Lev Vygotsky, knowledge, thought, and learning are social and collaborative…

Originally developed as part of a project for the Department of Defense Schools (DoDDS) system, this learning package on strategic thinking through writing is designed for teachers who wish to upgrade or expand their teaching skills on their own. The package includes an overview of the project; a comprehensive search of the ERIC database; a…

The University of North Dakota possesses an archive containing the schoolwork, writings, and artworks of 32 children. In a study, all of the fiction and poetry of three of the children were gathered, as were teachers' descriptive records and examples of the children's drawings. It can be concluded from a study of the randomly selected children…

Characteristics that describe composition studies at its best (interdisciplinarity, collaborative, dialogic, radically democratic, maintaining a dynamic tension between "praxis" and "theoria") do not reflect a view of writing which is widely shared either by academics in fields other than composition or by those engaged in…

THE FOLLOWING IS THE FULL TEXT OF THIS DOCUMENT: At my university, students are required to take a two course sequence in freshman composition, EH 101 and EH 102. EH 101 covers six basic essay forms utilizing description, narration, process description, classification, comparison/contrast, and argument. Because EH 101 is a basic, required course,…

Nonnative speakers learn to write just as native speakers do, by learning to adjust their "monitors." Teachers too often focus on form rather than on the students' interests and abilities. With the monitor working at a low level, beginning writers can use their store of acquired skills, and with the monitor level higher, they can…

To help provide writing instruction to elementary school children who are taught English as a second language, a writing project was designed for three ESL students: a third grader from Japan, a fourth grader from Costa Rica, and a fifth grader from Indonesia. The goals of the project were to help the students find writing to be enjoyable and…