The 38 essays in this book look back at language experience as an educational approach, provide practical classroom applications, and reconceptualize language experience as an overarching education process. Classroom teachers and reading specialists describe strategies in use in a variety of classroom settings and describe ways to integrate…

Intended for reading professionals, this yearbook contains 13 articles dealing with reading and allied fields divided into 2 sections: "Issues" and "Practices." The following articles focus on issues: "Wish Fulfillment and Other Dangers in Reading" (Joan Develin Coley); "Emergent Reading Research: Synthesis and…

Teacher evaluation of student writing usually focuses on errors or inadequacies of the written product. One method of changing teacher attitudes is to conduct a writing workshop for department chairpersons to show the benefits and share the techniques of making writing an integral part of their particular disciplines. Such a workshop must address…

Music can be an effective motivational vehicle for teaching listening skills, literature, oral and nonverbal communication, creative writing, handwriting, spelling, and grammar. One idea for integrating music into the language arts involves the use of song lyrics as reading materials. Since contemporary country music, and its precursor folk music,…

Ten six- and seven-year-old British children were chosen for case study investigation of the importance of children's interactions with each other and with their teacher in launching writing through sustained speech. The school was identified by educational experts as one of the "progressive" or "informal" variety, where…

Based on the belief that the teaching and learning of language are inextricably intertwined, this book addresses the challenge of providing an integrated language arts program in the elementary and middle school level that bridges traditional instruction and thematic, whole language, or literature-based instruction. The book also presents ways to…

This revised edition, based on literacy programs in Michigan, was written to reflect changing trends in reading and literacy in a book that can be used to train volunteer tutors, as well as by tutors and students together in weekly sessions. The book is organized in eight sections. The first section differentiates literacy and reading and…

Videotapes have proven useful in studying children's early classroom writing experiences, capturing and preserving the contextual integrity of the writing situation in a way that would be nearly impossible to do in words. Because the tapes can be played over and over again, it is possible to extract meanings from the situation that might otherwise…

This handbook, developed for an adult learning center in Pennsylvania, uses word processing instruction on Apple IIe computers to promote student writing. The handbook was designed for use by adult basic education, General Educational Development, and English-as-a-Second-Language students who read at a fourth-grade level or higher. In the 15…

A pilot tutor training project, the Student-Tutor Orientation (STO), was designed to meet the need for making whole-language concepts of reading and writing instruction accessible to tutors as well as students through hands-on experience and for establishing a collaborative tutoring relationship in which students share in decision making.…

Using the latest research theories, this elementary school curriculum guide was prepared for kindergarten through grade 6 by the teaching staff and curriculum office of the Mehlville (Missouri) School District for teachers of language arts. Methods of instruction included in the guide are language experience approach, writing process, and…

Research indicates that reading and writing should be learned together since both are language processes, and that children should be shown how the skills they have acquired during learning to read apply to learning to write. A language experience approach is useful for accomplishing this. Many aspects of writing point out the integrative…

A method is described for teaching writing to students for whom English is nearly a "first" language by virtue of the nature and circumstances of their use of it. The basic tenet of the approach is that the student can only learn to write well if he has a belief in himself and in the value of his own responses. To write well, the student must…

This paper describes a program that systematically increases the composition productivity of disabled students who are inexperienced writers. Program features include building discourse units, using student-generated language, and incorporating self-evaluation. Procedures for small group instruction focus on constructing and testing clauses,…

Interspersing vignettes and comments, this book describes the "Doing Words" program of teaching reading and writing to kindergarten and first-grade children. The book notes that the system is based on talking with the children each day, and finding what words are the most important to them that day and giving them those words on a card…