Three classroom activities that can help students become better writers by building on skills they already have as well as by providing them with necessary strategies are conferences, journals, and class discussions. Conference groups--made up of three to five students discussing rough drafts of each other's written work and recorded by tape or…

This book provides new and traditional activities that are aimed at developing students' personal responses to literature in ways that improve their other language skills. The introductory chapter discusses organizing literature for study, and other chapters focus on specific literary genres, including drama, short story, novel, poetry, nonfiction…

This program includes an extensive series of learning activities designed to improve students' skills in many areas of English, including expository and creative writing, literature appreciation, vocabulary, listening and speaking, research, and reading. Each activity sheet indicates the subject of the activity, its classification, the number of…

In this paper, English teachers are urged to assist slow learners to discover their hidden potential. The paper deals with a wide range of topics, including the importance of early language arts experiences; ideas for developing a love of literature in all students; the value of having high expectations for all students; techniques for developing…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 13 titles include studies of traditional and phonemic spelling of fifth and sixth grade students; the cloze procedure as a method of teaching spelling; the effect of the clinically supervised teacher upon language arts…

A selective view of recent major areas of research into school processes related to language outcomes supports the contention of the Bullock Report and of many educational theorists who say that there is no one best way to improve language and literacy, but that schools and school variables can and do make differences. The research that is…

Educational cognitive style refers to a person's preferred ways of gathering meaning from surroundings. It involves four groups of behaviors: receiving, expressing, reasoning, and handling the receiving/expressing in specific settings or modalities. A comparison of communication and educational cognitive style shows that several ideas are common…

Defining young adult literature to include any book freely chosen for reading by a person between the ages of 12 and 20, this book is intended to help educate professionals in related fields about the growing body of such literature. The first section of the book provides an introduction to young adult literature, including a discussion of the…

Developed for grades kindergarten through four, this book contains activities for using the newspaper as an educational resource for content area instruction. The first two sections of the book offer a pretest for determining how much students use newspapers and what they know about newspapers, and introductory information on newspaper components…

Many Puerto Rican children currently enrolled in English as a second language (ESL) classes speak Puerto Rican English (PRE). Their speech is characterized by nonstandard features, including some from Black English. Because of actual or historical interference from Spanish, they do qualify for ESL enrollment, yet their language problems are…

This guide has been designed for use in teaching study skills to elementary school students, kindergarten through grade six. It contains lessons developed and refined over a three-year period in the skills areas of listening, scheduling and task analysis, memory, notetaking, and using a textbook. Each skills area is developed in the context of a…

Focusing on a two-year period, this informally written book describes the efforts of several rural elementary teachers to establish a writing center based on a unified language arts curriculum. The book relates the authors' background experiences, outlines the structure of the writing program, offers typical writing experiences and classroom…

The system of education in the United States mirrors, creates, and legitimates inequalities of the larger society that supports it. Legally required schooling ranks, sorts, and prepares children for the "real world," and contributes to social maintenance rather than to social change by stressing the "correctness" of some…

Visual literacy--an increasingly important skill that has lately been added to the wide range of skills that reading/English teachers are expected to teach--can be coupled with lessons in literary appreciation through the medium of the adolescent novel. Since students participate in a great deal of television viewing, it is as important for them…

In an "Esquire" magazine column, John Simon attempts to trivialize, through visual satire, the articulation by Wayne O'Neil of the linguistic position that teaching standard English perpetuates oppression and is itself oppressive; but his attempt provides, instead, a vivid representation of the political relationship between the teaching of…