To demonstrate how discourse tasks can differ in their cognitive difficulties, students in a graduate course on the teaching of writing participated in a procedure called "invisible writing." The purpose was to show the students that as they took on more cognitively demanding writing tasks, their ability to produce coherent discourse…

A student's fear of giving oral reports and the instructor's objection to using too much class time on oral reports are often seen as the major barriers that prevent an oral communication unit from being included in a business or management communications course. One approach to easing both concerns is the use of videotaping as a self-discovery…

The act of composition is based on perception, selection, and arrangement in time and space of what is seen. How the world is seen depends on experience, memory, sensibility, discriminative powers, sexual identity, and cultural and historical contexts. Students can learn to understand how their personality affects what they see by maintaining…

The writing across the curriculum program at La Salle University, Pennsylvania, derives its basic philosophy from Charles Bazerman's "The Informed Writer" which stresses that students learn about academic writing and reading in terms of a community of discourse. Though Bazerman's text is not used in the freshman composition course,…

Writing across the curriculum, or "writing-as-learning" (WAL), represents one of the most successful developments in writing instruction. WAL is an efficient teaching method for achieving educational goals in today's society because it effectively engages students in both the means and the ends of their education. Research has shown that…

To describe a cross-curriculum writing model designed for a middle school, this paper provides a condensed script of what the designer of the program said and did during its first year to steer the program in a productive direction. The paper is written in the form of exerpts from relevant conversations. The first conversation relates how the idea…

TREX, which stands for "translating into the mother tongue as an exercise in written language," is a classroom technique for exploring the native language by translating from a second or source language. The central feature is the individual student activity of translating, with subsequent group examination and comparison of lexical,…

When readability formulas are used to review workbooks and textbooks their value is limited because application techniques have failed to take into consideration the exercises and examples in these books. The O'Hear and Ramsey (OR) Corrective technique has been developed to alleviate this problem. It allows readability data to be used accurately…

This composition textbook/workbook for beginning and low-intermediate English as a Second Language/English as a Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) students contains topics that are developed to help move students from structured "writing" activities to free "composing" activities. The activities are intended to help students become…

Intended for those who want to teach composition primarily and centrally and not just as an adjunct to the study of literature, this book about the composing process provides continuing opportunities to put theory into practice. It consists of the following chapters: (1) "The Composing Process Is a Continuum"; (2) "Observing; Observing Your…

As a tool for composition classes, practice in letter writing can help create a community of discourse. Many issues can be touched on in a discussion on the role of letters in society: the value of letters to historians and biographers; note passing in elementary and secondary school; personal use; letter columns in the newspapers and magazines;…

A classroom activity to facilitate the process of forming images in the mind (seeing) while writing is described in detail. The activity, called the Where Exercise, consists of the instructor naming a series of locations and the students writing down three objects which they "see" in each of those locations. It is emphasized that the…

After presenting a series of assumptions about the teaching of playwriting (for example, that students can be taught the craft, if not the art, of playwriting; students must be kept to a strict deadline if they are to develop into disciplined writers; and playwriting should never be discussed outside the context of production possibilities), this…

By incorporating letters to the editor and other reader participation columns in print media into the content-focus of the course, composition teachers can bring to life the student's rhetorical situation, especially with respect to audience and purpose. Such reader-writing is especially effective when students analyze the texts for clues to the…

Designed to involve students directly and immediately in the process of intellectual inquiry by showing them that writing is a discovery process and by helping them in developing writing as a form of social dialogue, this book is organized to accentuate the dynamic, interactive character of the writing process. Chapter titles are: (1)…