The rationale, approaches, and mechanics of publishing a student yearbook in English-as-a-Second-Language programs are discussed, and examples are drawn from the experiences and practices at the University of Pennsylvania. The production of a yearbook is suggested as a context for student writing that transcends the scope of the essay and that can…

How writing teachers get students from the personal-experience theme, with its many colloquial terms, to the formal essay seems to be a national issue. Teachers are under pressure to do the thing that colleges seem to value most--to teach the kind of essay that corresponds to term papers or essay questions. Colleges emphasize this because it is…

A study focused on the effects of the Writing to Read program piloted at kindergarten and first grade levels in Community Consolidated School District 65. The report included measures of students' writing, performance on district-made and standardized reading tests, and a follow-up on second graders. Statistical techniques of group comparison and…

The Puente Project is a statewide program that helps Mexican American/Latino community college students in California achieve their academic goals. Puente's goals are to reduce the number of Mexican American/Latino community college students who drop out of school and increase the number who transfer to four-year institutions. To meet these goals,…

To help integrate reading and writing in grades K-8, this book presents teaching strategies that reflect the most recent classroom-based research. The book is divided into the following eight chapters: (1) "Why Integrate Reading and Writing Instruction? An Overview"; (2) "Making Early Connections: Promoting Emergent Literacy";…

To investigate differences in students' writing development due to teacher modeling, a study examined students enrolled in whole language classrooms in grades 1 and 2 in two separate school districts. Students enrolled in independent classrooms where teachers did not provide writing models were in a school in a lower middle class neighborhood of…

Brief reports are given of research projects worked on by staff members of the Scottish Council for Research in Education during 1983-84. Major projects included: (1) teaching strategies in the primary school; (2) second international (IEA) mathematics survey; (3) evaluation of the Craigroyston curriculum project; (4) further education for the…

While each English department will establish its own set of assumptions appropriate for its objectives and programs, the new rhetoric can bring some coherence to the teaching of writing and literature by providing students with reliable strategies for reading literature as well as writing. In teaching literature teachers need to demonstrate the…

Distinguishing between teaching writing and teaching word processing, this book is intended as a guide for teachers who wish to teach writing with microcomputers. The 13 chapters and authors are as follows: (1) "Integrating Composing and Computing," Elizabeth Sommers; (2) "A Writing Teacher's Guide to Computerese," James…

During 1985-86 the School Community Education Program (also known as the Umbrella Program), funded by the New York State Legislature, provided a variety of educational and training experiences to some 25,871 participants, including pre-kindergarten children and their parents; and students, teachers and supervisors from kindergarten through grade…

Because of its wide range of justifiable interpretations, Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" is an appropriate novel to use to help students become better critical readers. Scholarly criticism continues to debate the topic of Tess's character, yet recent feminist and deconstructionist approaches, as well as recently published…

Using ethnographic observations of 30 children in a multicultural inner-city fifth grade class over a period of one year, a study examined the children's classroom interactions with the literary genres of science fiction and fantasy, investigating their sequential acquisition of the constitutive elements of the two genres as well as their…

In recognition of the need to increase academic standards in its freshman composition course and expand its remedial English offerings, Laredo Junior College (LJC) in Texas developed a three-level remedial English program, with the lowest level focusing on sentence writing, the middle level on paragraph writing, and the upper level on essay…

A collection of papers presented at a seminar conducted at the Regional Language Centre (Singapore) on communicative language teaching includes: "Integrating the New and the Old in a Communicative Approach" (William T. Littlewood); "Communicative Competence and Language Teaching: Second Thoughts" (Christina Bratt Paulston); "Communicative…

An addition to the "wholeness of language" debate, this document is divided into two sections. The first reviews theories regarding the reading writing relationship, suggesting that an awareness of the interdependencies and commonalities among various forms of communication may provide insights leading to students learning to read like…