Designed for students in a community college introductory psychology course, this booklet provides course assignments and ideas to improve students' writing. The booklet covers the following topics: (1) course writing assignments and the steps in preparing summaries of readings; (2) academic honesty and ways to avoid plagiarism; (3) the use of…

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…

This study is the 11th and last report from the Reading-to-Write Project, a collaborative study of students' cognitive processes at one critical point of entry into academic performance. The report consists of an Introduction and seven essays, each of which discusses ways to teach a variety of aspects of reading and writing which have been tried…

How writing teachers get students from the personal-experience theme, with its many colloquial terms, to the formal essay seems to be a national issue. Teachers are under pressure to do the thing that colleges seem to value most--to teach the kind of essay that corresponds to term papers or essay questions. Colleges emphasize this because it is…

Using ethnographic observations of 30 children in a multicultural inner-city fifth grade class over a period of one year, a study examined the children's classroom interactions with the literary genres of science fiction and fantasy, investigating their sequential acquisition of the constitutive elements of the two genres as well as their…

One of a number of reports of a study of the writing development of 14- to 16-year-old students, this booklet is divided into two parts. The first part uses five criteria to analyze what four secondary students learn from composing imaginary stories: (1) What resources are used in the setting or situation? (2) What kind of ordering is used? (3)…

This handbook for teachers and the accompanying student workbook are the basic materials in a course on controlled composition that can be used for on-the-job training, adult education, or as part of a writing course for students at various grade levels. Controlled composition is a program for improving expository writing skills; the program…

Focuses on how children learn different written registers. Asserts that teachers must immerse children in a variety of texts to experience different registers of language and make explicit the purpose of registers, the role audience plays, and how information is organized in different registers. (MM)

Shows how to help students shape their self-selected writings into reports. In a class of students with learning and/or attitude problems, follows the development of one student's report writing through the processes of clarifying a purpose and audience, generating information with a word map activity, and organizing the information effectively by…

Encourages the use of imaginative writing about scientific phenomena and/or principles. Offers samples of student writings on the concept of succession. Includes a listing of topics which could be used for creative writing exercises and provides suggestions for classroom implementation. (ML)

Hypothesizes that the relationship between L1 and L2 writing is not one of interference, but rather application of L1 to L2 writing. Includes writing samples of first-, second-, and third-grade students enrolled in a bilingual program. (EKN)

Discusses how pretending to be a character or to help a character with a problem made reading and writing meaningful for middle school students. Describes activities that promoted writing about thinking, thinking as a character would, character integration, creating character journals, and relating to characters. (SR)

Investigates teacher-student conferences' influence on first graders' revision activity and knowledge about revision. Finds the most positive effects occurred for students who began with the least amount of knowledge about revision, who previously were doing the least amount of revision, and who were writing pieces judged among the lowest in…

Explains how and why journals were chosen as a component of literature group reading. Shares excerpts from the journals of several children. Draws conclusions about the value of journals in contrast to more conventional written assignments. (MG)

Presents a grade one and two activity that teaches students the strategy of reading like a writer. Demonstrates the method using Dayal Kaur Khalsa's "I Want A Dog." (MM)