This article discusses the advantages of using literature in language instruction with special needs students, outlines a process for developing instructional activities, suggests 19 specific books and related learning objectives and activities, and provides a lesson plan that illustrates the incorporation of direct instruction in a whole-language…

Very few students in the fifth through eighth grades have mastered basic reading/writing/thinking strategies. Improving language arts outcomes is the responsibility of all middle school teachers. The first step is achieving faculty and community consensus on ideal student outcomes in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Implementing language…

Argues that curriculum integration may lead to a diminution of social studies content. Contends that classroom activities done in the name of curriculum integration often have no educational value. Provides five guidelines to determine whether an instructional activity is appropriate for curriculum integration. (CFR)

Describes a unit taught in two middle school English classes, in which students wrote and illustrated their own adventure/journey folktales. (SR)

Describes activities using worms for instruction in science and language arts. (PR)

Discusses the lives and poetry of two female writers from Greek antiquity, Sappho and Praxilla. Describes using Sappho's poems with sixth graders and includes some student poems written in response. Describes using Praxilla as a writing model in conjunction with Sappho while teaching American high school students. (SR)

Looks at how standards in some form predominate the current landscape of education. Argues that standards pose little threat to teacher autonomy, but that teachers should find what is useful in the standards movement and merge that into what works in the classroom. Argues that educators must join the greater debate about education. (SR)

Reflects on how the author's third-grade students, experienced in literary conversation from their reading workshop, transferred the practice of literary conversation to their writing workshop. (SR)

Using the Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching (COLT) observation theme, this study compares the second-language-learning environments of elementary-level students of French in four submersion and four immersion classrooms in Montreal, Canada. Results indicate clear differences between the two environments. (Author/VWL)

Sketches the development of didactic research in France in the field of language and literature over the past two decades. Proposes answers to these questions: What is the status of the notions taught by the discipline? How are these notions constituted? What is the role of values and knowledge in school exercises and school goals? What is to be…

Observes that kids and teachers are sabotaged by the way urban schools are funded, organized, and run. Advises city teachers to never assume students cannot learn something the teacher wants to teach, to teach literature that both teachers and students will love studying together, and to remember that students themselves are a valuable resource.…

Asserts that, while most elementary classrooms have become workshop communities in which teachers and students share reading and writing, many teachers are unsure how to extend the workshop into an environment in which rigorous teaching about the craft of writing takes place. Argues that learning to write well is not divorced from authentic…

Looks at the discussion of a small group of girls (ordinarily reticent or diffident in class) in a senior English class as they interpreted the character of Ophelia in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." Discusses the idea that thinking can develop through dialogic (collaborative) rather than dialectic (conflictive) transactions. Notes classroom…

Describes the collaboration between a seventh-grade English class of unmotivated readers and a group of reading methods students at a nearby university. Discusses how both classes read Carolyn Meyer's "Rio Grande Stories," wrote to each other as pen pals, made a quilt together, visited the university class, and enjoyed a visit from Meyer. (SR)

Investigated the connection between teachers' beliefs and instructional practices when the beliefs were informed by formalist thinking related to truth and caring. Responses to a teaching problem posed to middle school students and language arts teachers indicated that teachers' instructional strategies were guided by formalist beliefs, which…