Crucial to the success of a writing program are the writing instructor's perception of and response to the quality of student writing. There are three areas to be considered: students' grades, students' writing, and the instructor's comments. Unfortunately, disparity in these areas often gives contradictory indications about the instructor's…

Intended for both elementary and secondary school teachers who have little or no experience in teaching creative fiction writing, this booklet presents sample lesson plans for writing short stories, fables, myths, mysteries, science fiction, and historical fiction. The lesson plans discuss such elements as plot, setting, characterization, mood,…

Intended for use by both elementary and secondary school teachers, this booklet is designed to answer questions instructors might have as they consider integrating microcomputers into their writing programs. Following a brief introductory section, the second section of the booklet reviews the advantages and disadvantages of using computers in the…

One objective of the International Study of Achievement in Written Composition was to develop an instrument that could explore the relationships between instructional variables and educational results. Three levels of specificity were aimed at: (1) broad and general characteristics of the instructional process; (2) specific dimensions of native…

A study was conducted to document the written language of kindergarten children as a transaction among writers, teachers, and the writing process. Six children's writing processes and two teachers' instructional behaviors were examined using videotaped observations during an eight month period in two kindergarten classrooms. Writing products of…

A study was conducted in Louisiana to ascertain trends in business communication subject matter that could lead to improved methods of teaching business communication while simultaneously providing greater relevance to today's business world. A limited-choice response scale was completed by 20 business communication educators; 10 who were…

In this article, I examine the potential roles of reflective writing in ESOL teachers' learning and professional renewal. I demonstrate its importance with insights from aspects of a study on the accounts ESOL teachers construct when they do write about teaching.

Intended for the language arts teacher, this book focuses on how to develop children's language skills. The opening chapter of the book presents a brief overview of child language acquisition, children's language abilities at a particular age, and how these abilities develop. The second chapter, on the importance of children's literature, is based…

A college expository writing instructor investigated how students perceive teacher intervention during the writing process and how written teacher comments affect successive drafts of student compositions. During the semester, four students were asked to react on tape to the comments the instructor wrote on the second drafts of their compositions…

The success of a writing across the curriculum project is described in this paper. The paper notes that the first two years of the project, sponsored by internal university grants and state funding, consisted of (1) workshops and training sessions of small numbers of non-English faculty in designing and evaluating writing assignments and in…

A study examined whether using a tree diagram (a graphic, multidimensional classification device) as a prewriting organizer would provide students with a systematic method of searching for and organizing the content of their descriptive writing to meet some communication goal. One-hundred twenty-three seventh grade students were classified as…

Based on the premise that teaching basic writing involves first understanding what tends to go wrong when students write, a computer assisted system of error prediction and analysis was designed to improve college students' writing skills in both English and French. Students were to complete a sequenced series of writing assignments first in…

The purpose of the proposed study was to examine relationships between instructional characteristics in required high school composition classrooms and quality of writing in one of the four domains included in the curriculum, the imaginative/narrative domain. Questionnaire data were collected on objectives, writing activities, and specific writing…

One of the prevalent misconceptions that severely limits the possibilities of curriculum change in schools is the belief that theory has no direct relevance to pedagogical problems and that what is really needed are practical ideas for classroom instruction. Serious curriculum change requires an explicit dependence upon improved applications of…

Operation Rewrite, a program developed for use in English instruction in Quebec (Canada), is a constructive teaching-learning method for increasing students' linguistic competency in written discourse. The program provides middle and secondary school students with structured exercises to study and rewrite, using the author's exact format but with…