A practicum provided 10th- grade students in 2 English honors classes with direct instruction in sentence combining. The goal of the program was to increase the syntactic complexity of student writing, to have students express more in each sentence. Instruction was approached from different aspects. The students worked with two textbooks on…

This manual outlines physical fitness tests that may be used in the schools. The tests are based on criterion standards which indicate the levels of achievement at which health risk factors may be reduced. Test theory, protocols, and criterion charts are presented for: (1) muscle strength and endurance, (2) body composition, (3) flexibility, and…

The personal journal has become a standard component of the writing curriculum, yet there is little research to support dramatic claims for its effectiveness. Journals, which differ from personal diaries or common notebooks, are associated with the "Neo-Platonist or Expressionist" approach to writing instruction, yet adherents of other…

The Cooperative Principle posits four general ways in which a speaker is expected to be cooperative: (1) quantity--make a contribution no more and no less informative than is required; (2) quality--say only that which one both believes and has adequate evidence for; (3) relation--be relevant; and (4) manner--make a contribution easy to understand.…

While the classroom situation and textbook exercises are not irrelevant or useless, business writing assignments need a healthy dose of "real-world experience" to make their importance obvious to students. The instructor has only to ask a local employer if the business students can do some of the writing that is backing up in the employer's…

An upper-division graduate level course at a Northwestern university teaches storytelling by using a rhetorical approach. Students submit three story summaries in assigned format at each class session. Each summary includes a statement of the point or moral of the story, a complete bibliography, and a listing of the story's source. The assignment…

What first graders chose to put in their journals when given no direct suggestions for topics was studied during the 1985-86 school year in a suburban Birmingham, Alabama, classroom. Journal writing was scheduled for 30 minutes daily throughout the school year, but not all children chose to write every day. At the end of the year, all of the…

In response to the New York State Fifth Grade Writing Test indicating inadequacies in students' writing abilities in a Southwest Bronx elementary school, a study employed Evelyn Rothstein's developmental, systematic instructional approach to improve students' writing competencies. It was hypothesized that, as a result of the instructional program…

The 1981 and 1984 studies of revision, developed by the Wisconsin Pupil Assessment Program, are described in this document, which examines how well students are able to revise their own papers. Contents include an explanation of how the 1981 and 1984 evaluation criteria were created; an overview of the results of the 1984 revision study for grades…

The Basics Skills English 100 course at Slippery Rock University, having changed from a traditional approach to an approach that reflects knowledge gained through research about the needs of basic writers, shows the progress basic writers can make in a summer program. Thirty students met six times a week for five weeks in one-and-a-half hour…

Dialogue journal writing offers students of English as a second language (ESL) authentic, natural communication practice in the classroom. It is an interactive, self-generative, cumulative and functional writing/reading exchange between student and teacher, and is being used successfully in many kinds of ESL classrooms, with all age groups, and…

A case can be made for teachers to use audience-oriented teaching strategies that encourage children to write for a wide range of readers. Even so, questions remain about how writers, especially student writers, actually learn to consider an audience of readers when they write. Research suggests that a developmental trend exists in which children…

In a composition course, interview assignments have four key virtues: (1) they are interesting in themselves; (2) they ease students into the demands of working with other people's ideas; (3) they offer a rationale for improving rhetorical skills; and (4) they allow students to experience adult, responsible roles in a social context. In addition,…

A current selection from the many citations of material in the ERIC database, this bibliography offers practical information for introducing and implementing writing across the curriculum programs in elementary and secondary schools. The bibliography is divided into sections on (1) writing across the curriculum (8 citations); (2) writing to learn…

Initial studies have suggested that a cardiac rehabilitation program (CRP) may improve the physical and psychological functioning of participants. However, these studies have generally addressed a relatively young group of employed adult males. Three studies were designed to target an older, generally retired Veterans Administration population for…