The computer can be a powerful tool to help students who are having difficulty learning the skills of prewriting, composition, revision, and editing. Specific software is suggested for each phase, as well as for classroom publishing. (Author/JDD)

Examines the effects of word processing on high school seniors' writing and revisions of essay assignments. Length of papers, the impact of topic on the results, the effect of handwriting papers after computer composition, comparison of writing methods over time, and effects of typing ability and computer experience are discussed. (Contains eight…

This article examines studies that have attempted to help increase comprehension of expository text for students who are struggling readers and/or have reading disabilities. In doing so, this review reveals that (a) few studies have explicitly claimed to include these students in their work and (b) future research needs to include larger numbers…

Using multiple baseline designs, we studied the effects of having seven 9th graders edit their papers until a naive reader accomplished a drawing assignment during writer immersion (communication in writing only). During Experiment I, students received no feedback in the first phase, teacher editing feedback in phase 2, and writer immersion plus…

A within-subject pretest-posttest comparison design was used to explore the effectiveness of a planning and writing intervention in improving the argumentative writing performance of five fourth-grade students with learning disabilities. Students were taught to collaboratively plan and revise their essays and independently write their essays using…

Technology can be incorporated as a tool in business communication courses to help students format, revise, and enhance pieces of writing. The capabilities of the microcomputer should be introduced slowly to build competencies and confidence. This paper provides instructional tips and activities for introducing technology into assignments. Steps…

A study investigated university students' perceptions of the performance of peer evaluation groups in English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) writing instruction, and of their own performance within the group. Subjects were 45 Chinese freshmen in their first semester in the Mass Communications Department at a Taipei university (Taiwan), with 6 years…

A study investigated the effectiveness of a text revision strategy in improving the writing skills of college students (St. Lawrence Campus of Champlain College in Quebec) of French as a second language. Subjects were two groups of students in one course. One group (n=24) was taught a revision technique using self-questioning to detect and correct…

Use of metacognitive strategies, creative problem solving, and creative thinking techniques in intermediate grade writing instruction can promote students' thinking and creativity. Metacognitive strategies can help students attack the writing task in an orderly fashion. Answering specific questions for descriptive, expository, narrative, or…

A study investigated the writing strategies used by bilingual and monolingual students. Specifically, the study looked at field dependence vs. independence, possible differences in strategies employed by the two groups when using a word processor, the effects of strategy on the types of revisions made, and the types of revisions and cognitive…

To determine how much electronic writing-analysis programs can offer college students and how valuable computerized text actually is, nine college student essays and nine professional essays were analyzed using text editors. The student essays (three each rated "superior,""average," and "failed") and the professional…

While artificial intelligence is far from producing a computer program that can understand English, there are computer applications for teaching composition that go beyond the electronic flashcard and other limited applications. A number of programs designed for use in college freshman English as a second language classes based on the artificial…

This investigation of the effect of typing skill on using a word processor for composition hypothesized that students who had learned keyboarding skills would: (1) write longer essays when using a word processor; (2) revise their essays more when using a word processor; (3) feel more positive about typing when using a word processor than students…

Focusing on the teacher in the problems basic writers experience, a study analyzed the written interaction between a teacher and basic writers, culled from a larger ethnographic study of one freshman composition class. The purpose was to characterize the mode of discourse within a communicative exchange called "theme-ing," which begins…

A proposal for a term paper writing course associated with a content area course is presented in this paper. The paper outlines the proposed course, in which a content area teacher assigns a term paper and has control over appropriate subjects for the students' papers. The paper explains that the course provides help in library research…