Cites essays by Joan Didion, John Berryman, and Martin Luther King in arguing that the essay, no matter how serious, can be considered as a fiction and a playful, exploratory and deeply interesting rhetorical game. Describes how these works were used to teach students that the essay is a living document calling for interaction. (SG)

Explores the nature of children's poetry. Describes an underlying mechanism activated when children engage deeply, meditate unselfconsciously, and express those meditations through the act of writing. Urges teachers to incorporate into writing instruction children's natural inclination to play. (MM)

Four principles are presented for teaching children, across age and grade levels, to write and enjoy writing: interrelating literature and writing, teaching writing as an intellectual rather than a mechanical process, emphasizing process over product, and teaching writing as a holistic process rather than a set of isolated skills. (PB)

Describes the use of dialogue journals to integrate reading and writing in a mixed-grade, mixed-ability (1-3) classroom. Describes student responses (retellings, clarifications, personal subjective responses, and interpretive comments). Advocates that students write continually as they read through a text. Demonstrates that dialogue journals can…

This paper describes the WRITE UP strategy for helping emotionally disturbed students overcome fears of creative writing, organize their thoughts and improve their writing skills. The writing process is covered from subject selection and brainstorming through composition to editing and the final draft, with grading seen as a teaching tool. (PB)

Suggestions for helping students learn to write in a foreign language are offered. Areas for the teacher to consider include recognizing students' basic needs, rewarding risks that students take, listening for content before correcting, introducing vocabulary and usage, and writing with the students. (12 references) (LB)

Outlines the importance of a literature-based curriculum that encourages higher-order thinking skills. Discusses the reader-response approach to language arts teaching as a valuable instructional process, that emphasizes the connections between what is in a text and the reader's previous knowledge and experience, thus fostering higher-order…

This field manual for composition teachers, written by community college and University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) writing instructors, examines practical and theoretical problems and strategies associated with teaching composition. Essays in chapter I, by Ruth Mitchell and Faye Peitzman, underscore the relevance and implications of…

Bringing together an enthusiasm for biography and a belief in in-depth learning through long-term projects which include manipulating the material to be learned, this book presents a reading-and-writing approach to biography for elementary and middle school students in which students research and write biographies. Following a foreword and an…

A collaborative effort on the part of teachers from and consultants for the University of California, Irvine/California Writing Project, this guide presents ideas for teaching writing as a process at all levels of the curriculum. Each section of the guide presents an essay introducing the section topic, followed by practical ideas for teaching…

The first edition of this book in 1987 examined how teachers teach and how learners learn in the context of reading and writing workshops for middle school students. This revised edition still stresses the workshop approach to writing and English instruction, but it calls for a more activist approach by the teacher, encouraging more direction and…

Provides an organizational format for students to use when writing an ethnographic essay. Uses an organizing structure enabling students to produce professional written work in sociology. Outlines and identifies tasks to be accomplished in each section of a research report. (Author/NL)

As part of an ongoing dialogue among teachers in California high schools, this sourcebook addresses some of the issues involved in teaching English/Language Arts at the secondary level. The sourcebook is divided into eight chapters, and begins with an overview answering questions concerning the California Model Curriculum Standards (MCS) for…