A practicum was designed to provide opportunities for second-grade students from low socioeconomic school communities to use computer technology in the writing process. Staff development training was designed and conducted to increase teachers' knowledge, experience, and attitudes toward using the computer as a tool for writing. Providing…

Writing teachers and theorists face political and pedagogical dangers because of their increasing tendency to align themselves against each other on the side of either rhetoric or composition. As the differences between the two schools widens, writing teachers stand to lose political ground in English departments and their students stand to lose…

To clarify the relevance of Russian psychologist, literary critic, philologist, and educational theorist Lev S. Vygotsky's research to composition theory necessitates an examination of his account of the development of inner and oral speech. Vygotsky argued that the acquisition and development of oral speech is due to its function: it is primarily…

Originally developed as part of a project for the Department of Defense Schools (DoDDS) system, this learning package on writing across the curriculum is designed for teachers who wish to upgrade or expand their teaching skills on their own. The package includes an overview of the project; a comprehensive search of the ERIC database; a lecture…

Students at all levels of literacy learning can express their ideas in print. Teachers working with student writers have found that the attempt to express, organize, and understand personal experience is also a powerful language learning device. When students publish their writings, they can see their own thoughts and concerns, and those of others…

This is the first issue of a new journal, to be published annually, by the California Association of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (CATESOL). Articles in this issue include: "English as a Bridge between Cultures: Scotland, Carolina, and California" (Patricia C. Nichols); "Cambodian Refugees: Factors Affecting…

Word processors can enhance the reading and writing skills of underprepared college students in a special course combining reading and writing. Word processors may serve such a course in many ways: (1) storing and retrieving students' own unpublished resource materials; (2) moving large blocks of writing at the flick of a finger; (3) serving as…

A study examined the influence of prior knowledge on the quality of responses in three process-approach tasks: writing, conferencing, and revising. Subjects, 20 high-knowledge and 20 low-knowledge fourth grade students, wrote stories about a baseball game. Propositional text bases of first and second drafts were analyzed according to six…

Recent research on writing that sheds light on writing instruction in English as a second language (ESL) focuses on contrastive rhetoric (the interference of first language rhetoric experienced by the second language learner), patterns of development in English scientific texts that cause problems for second language readers, the contrastive use…

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…

Examines the attitudes of students to several aspects of the writing process. Concludes that the process approach to writing improved students' attitude toward composition. (SRT)

Proposes a creative writing workshop model to shift the focus from the product of writing--the finished poem or story--to the process of writing by engaging students in the imitation of writing processes used by published writers. (MS)

This report describes a program for improving writing skills and related attitudes towards writing of elementary students. The target population consisted of fourth grade students in stable middle to upper class suburban communities, located northwest of a large midwestern city. The problems of inadequate writing skills and poor writing attitudes…

Included in this guide are strategies for helping struggling secondary readers and writers so that they will develop the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) necessary to write successfully and have greater access to the general curriculum. It focuses on the writing process because research supports the efficacy of the writing process as a…

A study examined the effect of a structured writing process on student comprehension during a year-long classroom writing workshop. Subjects included 10 sixth-grade students of average reading and writing comprehension who completed an initial writing survey as well as quarterly writing behavior self assessments and writing evaluation conference…