Since engineering graduates and other technical students are frequently expected to document their projects as well as present such material orally, a Speech and Technical Writing course was designed at a New Hampshire college to prepare students for both technical writing tasks and oral presentations of their material. The course provides an…

Intended for college faculty in all disciplines, this guidebook offers practical methods and ideas intended to help teachers clarify writing assignments so that students' writing will improve, as has been seen to happen when teachers sharpen their responses to students' papers. Contents include: (1) "Assigning Writing," which describes…

Literacy should be viewed as the ability to enlist a repertoire of discourse forms to explore and extend thinking and learning. In this view of literacy and literacy learning, various forms of reading and writing are seen as distinct ways of knowing and acquiring knowledge for ones' own purposes. Supporting this view of literacy are theoretical…

Semantic mapping, which involves the application of vocabulary meanings, increases cognitive processing, and develops the cognitive structure, is recommended for use with literacy students in adult learning centers. Semantic mapping can be used as a prereading or prewriting stimulus, or as a postreading check of comprehension. Also, developing…

The language arts course content guides presented in this manual cover English, oral communications, and journalism in grades 9-12 and provide a framework from which a curriculum can be built. Within each subject area and at each grade level, skills are identified at three instructional levels: basic, developmental, and extension. The basic skills…

English department heads often find themselves walking a tightrope, trying to keep the various elements of their departments in balance. Yet despite the diversity of interests, English departments should maintain a united house. In fact, separating disciplines--such as writing and literature--into different departments would be negative for both…

A strategy for including writing of a research paper in a university's advanced intensive English course for students of English as a second language is described. The method consists of eight assignments given over the course of 11 weeks, resulting in a short research paper. The method is designed to minimize error by dealing with specific…

Critical thinking skills were taught to students in a lower-track freshman English class through the use of cross-disciplinary subject matter. Given a set of three transmission electron micrographs, or photographs of magnified tissue used in histology and pathology, students were asked to support their conclusions on which two of micrographs A, B,…

When students do not write well in stressful situations, traditional instruction such as grammar exercises, sentence combining, and imitation of sentences will not be especially useful. Students are not often aware of their linguistic insecurity or of how insecurity affects language usage. The writing lab, however, creates an ideal setting for…

Examining the impact of computers in language arts instruction, this journal issue focuses on the practical classroom use of computers. The essays discuss the following topics: (1) using the personal computer to organize the language arts curriculum; (2) computers in a writing project; (3) the potential of microcomputers for English classrooms;…

A training study, consisting of three treatment cycles for a total of nine 50-minute class sessions, was conducted to determine the combined effect of directed reading-thinking activity (DRTA) and conceptual mapping as organizational strategies for college freshmen of low writing ability. Each cycle included DRTA instruction, mapping, discussion,…

Prepared by writing center directors, the articles in this book examine the pedagogical theories of tutorial services and relate them to actual center practices. The 19 articles are arranged into three categories: writing center theory, writing center administration, and special concerns. Specific topics discussed in the articles include the…

This is one of three publications prepared by the Ohio State Board of Education to assist schools in implementing a competency based education program, as required by the 1983 revised minimum standards for elementary and secondary schools. This document provides assistance in planning and implementing an effective instruction/intervention…

To examine the writing process of personnel who write as part of their jobs and the relation of that process to the context in which they worked, a study was undertaken in a major corporation. Its aim was to research a model for teaching technical writing students that would bridge the gap between the classroom and the probable writing situations…

Using the latest research theories, this elementary school curriculum guide was prepared for kindergarten through grade 6 by the teaching staff and curriculum office of the Mehlville (Missouri) School District for teachers of language arts. Methods of instruction included in the guide are language experience approach, writing process, and…