Critical consciousness is essential to the praxis of a democratic culture. Both composition and literature instructors on the college level may be using the reflective or dialogue journal under the false assumption that recursive writing leads naturally to critical thinking. Experience with college sophomores indicates that the narrative pressures…

This 2-year longitudinal study explored whether computers promote more sophisticated thinking, and examined how students' thinking changes as they become experienced computer users. The first-year study examined the thinking process of four ninth-grade Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT) students. The second-year study continued following these…

The reading and writing abilities of children work together from the inception of thought to produce literacy. Children can read and write for learning and enjoyment. Each activity enhances the other's development at all levels, thus, writing should not be held back until reading is accomplished at a set level. Children come to school rich in…

Intended for preschool children, this workbook provides practice in the readiness skills for handwriting. The workbook's activities, presented in sequence of difficulty, promote the following skills: developing language; seeing similarities; seeing differences; filling in missing parts; writing basic strokes; drawing objects; establishing…

Intended for children in first grade, this workbook provides practice in writing correctly all 26 manuscript letters, both upper and lower-case, and numerals from 0 to 9. The alphabet used in the workbook is the Zaner-Bloser style of handwriting, the most widely used system in the schools of the United States. The strokes used to make each letter…

Intended for children in second grade, this workbook provides practice in writing correctly all 26 manuscript letters, both upper and lower-case, and numerals from 0 to 30. The alphabet used in the workbook is the Zaner-Bloser style of handwriting, the most widely used system in the schools of the United States. The strokes used to make each…

Intended to help freshman composition teachers develop productive audience strategy in their students, this paper explores useful and functional techniques elicited from expert writers to facilitate the generation of internal audiences for the typical college student in a required writing class. The paper encourages small-group peer discussion to…

One of the goals of writing instruction is to teach students to develop coherence in their writing; however, writing instruction that relies too heavily on logical connections and organizational techniques often introduces so many rules that students lose their personal connection to what they write. Coherence has less to do with structure than…

This study examined 27 current college textbooks on rhetoric and composition to determine the emphasis placed on invention and the organization of invention material. Results revealed that the average percentage of material devoted to invention was 11%, the lowest percentage in an individual text was 1% and the highest was 32%. The standard…

A survey investigated whether changes in the curricular status of professional writing have produced concomitant changes in pedagogy. The study examined whether there are more professional writing teachers teaching as they traditionally have or whether teachers are now rethinking their approaches to the subject. A survey instrument was completed…

This paper reviews research about writing that may inform teachers' observations of their students and their decisions about how best to support students' efforts. First, since ways of using written language vary with different social situations, the paper reviews research on how literacy functions in varied communities, including both the…

This paper presents practical classroom activities for teaching narrative/descriptive writing based on approaches to writing instruction that research indicates are powerfully effective, and discusses principles upon which effective and exciting instruction can be designed. The paper gives a brief overview of what research in the teaching of…

Integrating new insights into the writing process, and drawing upon cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics, this monograph develops the transactional theory of writing by using knowledge of the reading process as a metaphor. Chapters include: (1) "The Need for a New Theory of the Writing Process"; (2) "Bases…

The question of how children come to understand how the orthography of English works has been a central issue in reading research for well over 100 years. Reading educators have developed what they believe to be helpful conclusions and explanations for the development of orthographic word knowledge as it relates to reading, writing, and…

Intended for practitioners, this study has three principal aims: (1) to reduce the breadth of formal grammar instruction by first locating those areas where grammar and writing overlap and then identifying those kinds of writing problems most amenable to treatment with a grammar-based approach; (2) to decrease the classroom hours spent on formal…