The middle school and junior high school years are extremely important ones in the language, cognitive, and personal development of students. During this time, students should begin using longer sentences with more sophisticated embeddings and showing greater awareness of audience and organization in writing, speaking, listening, and reading. At this age, students should be increasingly more comfortable with transactional modes of writing. The revising stage of the composing process can best be dealt with in a workshop format. Sentence combining should be used as part of the revising assignment, with the complex embeddings drawn from the students' own revisions serving as models. Teachers should insist on meaning, first and form, second; otherwise, students will be discouraged from using more sophisticated constructions. Wide reading of voluntarily selected material and sustained silent reading encourage reading development. Writing and sharing personal responses to literature can help students expand their vicarious social experience, while exposure to many types of literary form, type, and genre expands their linguistic and literary experience. Practice in predicting meaning from context helps students develop reading maturity. In the final analysis, the teacher must provide a language rich environment that emphasizes active, productive language use. (JL)