By employing techniques learned through special education research together with the process approach to teaching writing, the composition teacher can help the ever-increasing number of learning disabled (LD) students in the developmental writing class to improve their writing. Using the process approach, LD students first concentrate on gathering…

This booklet is intended to help vocational teachers identify students who need remediation in one or more of the basic skills areas and to provide suggestions for assisting students in acquiring the basic skills they will need for employability. The guide provides information about basic skills in each of five areas (reading, writing,…

Guided story invention is a strategy for whole language instruction. The strategy stimulates construction of story and storylike passages, and incorporates: (1) student knowledge of story structure; (2) the reading and writing of meaningful text; (3) a focus on meaning as a function of teacher coaching; and (4) encouragement of self-monitoring of…

A study analyzed the extent to which writing teachers in conferencing situations employ the communication techniques used by professional helping agents. A metatheory of communication techniques developed by Allen Ivey and associates which attempts to combine and synthesize the relevant psychotherapeutic and counseling techniques in the profession…

A practicum addressing the problems of low motivation and poor writing quality of 50 underachieving 9th-grade basic skills students is described in this report. The objectives were to increase motivation among the students and to improve the quality of their essay writing. Peer tutoring was used as a method for encouraging students to help each…

Recently, the Communication Department at the University of Texas at Arlington offered an innovative news editing course taught collaboratively by a journalism professor and an editor of the "Fort Worth Star-Telegram," a metropolitan daily newspaper. In 1990 the course was continued on the model describes by R. L. Gates (1989), and in…

This paper describes a writing program designed for graduate students at the Smith College School for Social Work, and also a research project undertaken to identify and analyze the distinctive writing needs of this graduate school population. A major finding was that, although faculty understand the importance of argument and identify it as the…

A review of the literature on writing in a non-native or second language looked at empirical research, responded to a series of questions on the state of the art, and identified an agenda for future research. The questions addressed these issues: how writing ability in a non-native language (NNL) develops: whether there are developmental stages;…

Although varying in approach and emphasis, the articles in this yearbook serve the twin goals of creating a literate citizenry and nurturing the habit and tradition of reading. Following a foreword and an editorial, articles in the yearbook are: "Reading Assessment at the Statewide Level" (Peter Afflerbach); "The Road to Literacy:…

The professor who elects to offer instruction in one of the nation's prisons will be a paradoxical figure representing society's mainstream values to those individuals he is seeking to aid. Prisoners often harbor the belief that they are being dealt with too harshly and that they are being victimized unjustly. This point of view can be exploited…

An anthologized classroom is one in which students are writing toward an anthology of their own essays and drawing on the anthologies of previous classes. Students choose which of their own essays to include, and the works are then photocopied, bound, and sold to the students at cost before the end of the semester. The central challenge to the…

Departmental lines can interfere with collaboration among academic colleagues. Working together within the same department, a speech teacher and a writing teacher realized that both speech and writing have preparatory (planning and development), performance, and evaluation stages, and that within the various stages students use the same or similar…

A faculty member at the University of Toronto (Ontario) developed an informal survey designed to assess her undergraduate students' views of the writing they did during the course of their university studies. The survey consisted of a 2-page questionnaire that could be completed in 5 to 10 minutes; it was administered to 722 students during the…

By including more of the works written by Native Americans, college composition students benefit from a wealth of literary works, and perhaps they will be able to move beyond preconceptions about the difficulties of comprehending traditional Native American texts. Two speeches (Leslie Marmon Silko's speech "Language and Literature from a…

Cooperative learning is a teaching strategy in which small teams, each with students of different levels of ability, use a variety of learning activities to improve their understanding of a subject. Typical cooperative learning strategies used in grades 2 through 12 involve student teams in which students: (1) work on group projects that emphasize…