Collaborative learning, in which students form small groups to analyze their own writing, can cause students who recognize good writing and know the "rules" to reexamine their own writing and writing processes and then produce an acceptable product. Given eight sample paragraphs from their own writing, 20 freshman students working in 5…

The efforts of researchers to produce a pool of approximately 30 validated and field-tested topics for use in future administrations of the Florida Teacher Certification Examination in writing are reviewed in this paper. Various sections of the paper (1) describe the procedures followed; (2) explain the reasons for making certain important…

Intended to provide school principals and administrators with suggestions for leading a schoolwide writing improvement effort, this book describes the writing process and addresses the kinds of considerations of which administrators should be aware. Chapters in the book discuss (1) the composing process and the teaching of writing, (2) evaluating…

A detailed analysis and inventory were made of the errors found in 200 essays in French and English written by Franco-Ontarian secondary school students. Analysis of the French essays identified nine high-frequency error types, as well as several of lesser frequency. Only four error types were of high frequency in the English essays, while 18…

The teaching-questioning strategy developed in this paper, based on reader-response criticism and Kenneth Burke's pentad, can be used by teachers to elicit responses to any literary work and is designed to help students participate in a work's dramatic context, discover meaning as they read, and assure that their critical essays are based on an…

When the composition program at Kansas State University (Manhattan) was radically reoriented from one that emphasized the writing product to one that stressed the writing process, a number of problems surfaced. Teachers, for example, had difficulty in adjusting from being purveyors of rules and forms to being facilitators whose job was to help…

In fall 1980, the English division at Minneapolis Community College implemented a new approach to teaching Fundamentals of Written English. In recognition that students come to college with a wide range of preparation and skills, the Fundamentals course (formerly English 95) was divided into a two-course sequence. On the basis of student placement…

This book is designed to provide elementary school teachers with information, suggestions, and models for using writing in the social studies, from early primary to middle grades. There are four major chapters to the book. Chapter I is titled "Research on the Teaching of Writing." The articles in this first section move from a survey of research…

This collection of papers addresses the complex problem of humanistic literacy, stressing techniques for creating a relationship between our inherited knowledge and the abilities to read intelligently and write clearly. After an introduction on the issue of humanistic literacy and the preparation of this publication, the three papers in Section I…

Faced with an evening composition class filled with students inhibited by fears of failure and writing anxieties, the teacher redesigned the course to focus on ways to make writing an activity that could be fun. The teacher's plan for getting the students interested in writing consisted of (1) having students analyze essays they agreed were…

Intended to help teachers in developing language arts curriculum materials for use with the children of recent Bahamian immigrants to the United States, this paper contains approximately 500 topics for creative and expository writing based on the roots of Bahamian culture. The topics are arranged into areas of interest, including Bahamian pride,…

The following papers on English as a second language (ESL) are collected here: (1) "The Joy of Language" by H. Douglas Brown, (2) "Hats Off to the TESOL Classroom Teacher" by Darlene Larson, (3) "Two Languages in One Brain: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics" by Lev Soudek, (4) "Do Techniques Derived from…

C. Smith's "read a book in an hour" procedure for the development of listening and reading comprehension and B. Beyer's "hamburger writing" procedure for the development of composition skills formed the basis of a teaching technique that provided students with problem solving tasks, a procedure for writing compositions, and exposure to a classic…

As part of a continuing effort by the Indiana Department of Public Instruction to share practical, easy-to-implement reading techniques, this booklet offers a collection of teaching activities under various topics related to reading. Of the eight sections in the booklet, four deal with writing, because an anticipated outgrowth of improved skill in…

Presented at a writing center conference by English department faculty members from around the United States--all involved with writing centers--the papers in this collection relate personal experiences and discuss many of the problems faced by writing centers. The ten papers deal with the following topics: (1) the progress and future of writing…