Thirty-seven secondary and four college English teachers in Maine participated in research on a two-fold problem: late adolescents' indifference to writing and their typically superficial themes. The secondary teachers planned 12th-grade writing sequences integrating the study of composition and literature and relating it to problems of immediate adolescent concern. They used these sequences in their college preparatory classes. The next year, two sections of Freshman Composition, composed equally of students from the senior high experimental classes and from control classes, used the same approach to literature on a more sophisticated level. At the end of the secondary school phase, the compositions of students in the classes using the writing sequences showed better organization, spelling, and word sensitivity than the compositions of other seniors; at the conclusion of the college phase, the students having had exposure to the experimental curriculum in both high school and college again demonstrated superiority in written composition over students having had only half or none of the curriculum. The findings indicated that such a coordinated program integrating the secondary and the college English courses can accelerate students' abilities to understand, to analyze, and to communicate increasingly complex ideas. (LH)