The Writing Across the Business Disciplines Project at Robert Morris College has had a profound effect on faculty from various disciplines who have taken part in the program since its inception in 1985. Each participant targets a specific course in his or her own field for intensive scrutiny and eventual re-design. During this process, faculty…

Intended to serve as an introduction to a useful method of composition evaluation, this handbook provides a comprehensive checklist of many relevant topics and issues. The handbook begins with a discussion of the basic concepts of evaluation. The next chapter provides an overview of the components of a writing program as a background and context…

Recent research indicates that typical writing assignments given to advanced students of English as a second language do not prepare them for university level writing. However, the technique of information transfer, which involves presentation of a visual stimulus to prompt writing, can be used effectively to practice the skills most…

Personal observations as a writing instructor, combined with the findings of many experts, point to the fact that all children need to learn and internalize a "writing process" in order to master composition on an adequate level. Learning disabled children, who may possess several processing difficulties, have severe deficits to overcome…

The existing German curriculum should be updated to include career-oriented, career-related language courses, especially in German commercial language, since West Germany is one of the world's most important trading countries and the United States is a major trading partner. Language fluency alone is not sufficient for employment in international…

Designed to demonstrate a variety of ways in which listening, speaking, reading, and writing activities can be built around the study of biographies, this collection of materials, lessons, and activities deals with some of the most frequently taught biographical works in New York City ninth-grade classrooms. The document begins with a general…

Based on a writing program evaluation project that took place in the Ferguson-Florissant School District in suburban St. Louis, Missouri, this booklet provides administrators and policymakers with a plan for evaluating their own writing programs and also provides results of the Ferguson-Florissant evaluation. The first chapter contains…

None of the current issues in education have much to do with education; they are politically, socially, or economically based, and opinions tend to be presented as facts. For example illiteracy statistics are inflated. Virtually all children have the opportunity to learn to read and write at school, and the majority of them do. Neither is the…

The first of a planned series of papers, this document describes in detail a context for writing created by a teacher and her second grade class. Section one includes the teacher's diary of plans for using an imaginary doll, "Mr. Togs the Tailor" as a context for learning during most of a term and selected children's writing on such topics as Mr.…

English teachers tend to welcome computers uncritically into the classroom, resulting in three problem areas: (1) a lack of critical thinking about computers and their role in writing pedagogy; (2) a limited selection of computer-assisted instruction that is both theoretically and pedagogically sound; and (3) a limited program of research on the…

Most of the 24 books reviewed in this annotated bibliography concern writing and are recent publications (1980-1985). Titles and authors are as follows: "Teacher" (Sylvia Ashton-Warner); "What Did I Write? Beginning Writing Behavior" (Marie M. Clay); "Composing: Writing as a Self-Creating Process" (William E. Coles);…

Geography, wealth and density of populations, prevailing religious beliefs, and educational systems all influenced the evolution of educational tools and methods of instruction in the United States. Due to the practical nature of the early settlers, writing was taught earlier in America than in England, using quill pens and handmade rag pulp…

A workshop was developed at the Bank of Canada to give instruction in writing brief summaries of financial analyses to junior economists entering the bank after university. These employees were expected to write these analyses for the senior officers of the institution. It had been found that the specialists had not learned strategies for…

For basic writers, learning to write means learning new syntactic and textual forms and new ways of relating to an audience. This means that students must have certain kinds of knowledge about what differentiates writing from speech and what distinguishes sentences and texts/paragraphs that are focused and explicit. In addition, an enabling…

After students recommended books by M. E. Kerr, such as "Is That You, Miss Blue?" and "Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack," a college teacher realized that Kerr's books contained memorable characters and were suitable for classroom use. Particularly useful was Kerr's 1983 nonfiction book, "Me, Me, Me, Me, Me," which recounts…