The social contexts students need to encourage productive collaboration in their writing can be provided by attending to various design features of the English microcomputer laboratory. Collaborative learning offers a powerful alternative to traditional classroom teaching methods and helps students become part of a community that approximates the…

This history of computer text analysis of student writing while brief, is complicated by the fact that there are actually three distinct efforts underway to use the computer for such purposes. There is a certain amount of overlap among the efforts, but their intentions are different enough to warrant separate review. The first effort is toward…

Describes a study that explored the collaborative writing processes of a group of business executives over the course of a year as they prepared a vital company document. Shows how context affected the writers' conceptions of their rhetorical situations and their writing behavior and how the rhetorical activities influenced the structure of the…

Deals with the special problems of collaborative writing, such as integrating style, tone, and purpose. Notes that with access to a computer, collaborative writers can improve communication by using electronic mail to review rough drafts and by editing their work with word processing software. (EL)

This booklet provides information and teaching strategies to support the teaching of sentence level work in Year 7 (England). Focus in the booklet is on using the sentence level objectives in the context of shared writing, and the emphasis is on putting knowledge and language to use, rather than treating it in isolation. Care has been taken to…

Describes an online lesson-writing collaborative project between inservice and preservice teachers via e-mail. Results indicated no significant difference between the quality of lessons created by inservice and preservice teams as well as an improvement in the attitudes of preservice teachers about the possibilities of telecommunications for…

Studies with 8 children in the United Kingdom and 30 in Finland show that verbal interactions of children doing collaborative writing with a computer are highly task-related and characterized by exchange of information, questioning, judging, organizing, and composing. Exploratory and argumentational use of language was found to be low. (SLD)

Considers how ideology in its various manifestations intersects with collaborative composing both in the business writing class and in the corporation. Describes several classroom experiences which demonstrate how ideology influences students' collaborative dynamics. Considers from a more distant vantage how specific composing ideologies influence…

Examines the effects of computer network technologies on teacher-student and student-student interactions. Finds that teachers in networked sections interact more with their students than do teachers in regular sections and communicate more electronically with less able students than with more able students. Notes that less able students…

Interviews children in a collaborative learning classroom to understand their perceptions of collaborative learning. (MG)

Describes a course unit on fiction writing with an emphasis on motivating students to see value and relevance in writing. (RAE)

Reviews research on the effect of computers on writing. Concludes that students will not automatically revise and write more successfully with a word processor, that students tend to submit papers with fewer mechanical errors using word processors, and that they enjoy writing more and may collaborate more. (RS)

Describes a cross-county writing project involving a third-grade class and high school drama students. The third graders write character sketches and send them to the drama students, who write a play using the characters. The high school students then produce the play for the elementary students, complete with costumes, makeup, and scenery. (TJQ)

Presents a defense of the use of collaborative writing projects in writing classrooms, particularly in creative writing courses. Considers the issues involved in the use of such practices. Suggests ways to use collaborative writing in English classes. (HB)

Investigates scientific reasoning skills used by students in a naturalistic collaborative writing context and changes in students' reasoning discourse over time. Findings suggest that an understanding of socially constructed scientific reasoning skills is important for designing meaningful collaborative activities and assessments in science. (LZ)