In British primary schools reading and language skills are taught requiring the active involvement of the children in such activities as camping trips which result in student developed reading and writing materials. (JH)

Reviews the literature in the Educational Resources Information Center on using the language experience approach with secondary students and adults. (RB)

The readings and activities in this competency unit focus the attention of language arts program advisers and primary grade teachers on language instruction/development that is student-centered instead of program-centered. The first section of the unit shows teachers how to clarify their expectations and objectives concerning language instruction…

Discusses the use of invented spelling to help kindergarten students learn to spell. It provides a natural foundation for building spelling abilities by making students think about words and generate new knowledge. Activities are suggested and guidelines are presented for a developmentally sensitive spelling program. (SM)

Describes a version of language experience with adolescents that has students write about personal problems and dilemmas they have faced. (AEA)

The stories, essays, poems, and anecdotes in this booklet were written by students attending community-based literacy classes and they reflect the students' varied lives and experiences. Many of these pieces are appropriate for adult beginning readers and may encourage students to write their own stories that in turn may be read by others. The…

The language experience approach is a reading methodoloy that is highly organized, highly structured, and very systematic, but that allows teachers to teach without texts. It is a multiple, variegated set of activities designed to serve one purpose, namely, the instructional use of pupil's own language. As such, there are five interrelated aspects…

The purpose of this document is to provide a step-by-step outline of the language experience approach. It first explains this technique for teaching both words and sentences to beginning readers. Steps are outlined first for teaching words, then for teaching sentences. What to do and what to say is suggested for each step. Teaching words includes…

The hypothesis of this study was that stories created by a dialectical subgroup of third grade Negro children might be more comprehensible to other members of that group than the usual instructional materials. A random sample of third graders was asked to tell stories in response to four pictures. The stories were tape recorded and then…

A language-experience approach to teaching children to solve story problems is described. (JT)

The reader-written book program at Rockford (Illinois) Public Library has been an extremely successful outreach program used to interest the disadvantaged child in library materials and services. Reader-written books are written by using the language experience approach techniques of having the child tell a story orally, recording that story on a…

A study was conducted to determine whether students comprehend student-authored material more easily than the material of published authors. The Fry Readability Graph was used to estimate the readability of 8 published passages of 200-270 words, which varied from grade 5 through grade 10. The topic of each passage was listed and used in a 2-day…

This paper uses examples of the writing of profoundly hearing-impaired high school students and transcripts of teacher-student dialog to illustrate the evolution of thought in student writing. The development of a language arts curriculum that permitted students to explore, expand, and experience literary events is also described. (JDD)

This book focuses on functional and holistic approaches to English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) literacy, including competency-based education; whole language, language experience, and Freirean or participatory; and writing-based programs that result in published materials to be read by other adults. Chapter 1, "Literacy Through a…