A deductive-inductive sequence of writing instruction, in which students are instructed systematically before they begin to write, would help students learn to write well. Educators who propose a trial and error pattern ignore the facts that those learning to write do not have unlimited time in which to learn and are not dealing with an inherent…

Arising from the Schools Council Development Project on Writing Across the Curriculum, this book deals with talking, reading, thinking, and learning, as well as writing, as these processes take place in secondary schools. Suggesting that too much of the writing and talking in schools is used to test what students know and too little used to enable…

The nine articles in this publication examine the integration of career education with English instruction and suggest techniques for teaching literature and composition. The following topics are discussed: steps by which an English teacher can guide students toward pursuing career choices while instructing them in English skills; a college course…

The 23 articles in this collection suggest practical speech and drama activities for the English classroom. Among the topics discussed are the following: classroom discussion as theatre, using groups for more effective teaching, role playing activities that teach language concepts, improvisation as an instructional method, an oral approach to…

This handbook for high school English teachers includes sections on curriculum planning and course design, ideas for teaching English, and resources for teaching English. The topics in curriculum planning include course planning and design, individualizing, teacher-constructed materials, grading alternatives, aims and priorities, and…

To discover whether the typical college reading course repairs students' phonic disabilities to a significant degree and whether students who are severely phonically disabled benefit from the treatment provided in such courses, a study was undertaken involving students in 14 classes. Instruction for those students in the developmental reading…

Empiricists may be defined as naive fumblers, people who collect and analyze data in the absence of a guiding theory. A theory may be defined as an empirically verifiable explanation of phenomena that predicts behavior. Empirical research may be defined as scholarship that is public and is performed using entities measured in units that can be…

The Learning to Write Sentence by Sentence curriculum was developed at the College of Marin (California) to promote increased student awareness of quality in communication by providing concentrated exercise in writing. This self-paced course forces the student to think before writing, by using rhetorical and complicated instructions on how to…

Recent research projects have indicated that a majority of adolescent and adult students have not reached a formal level of cognitive functioning and must therefore be taught rhetorical modes such as comparison and classification. A study was constructed to investigate the cognitive skills development of average college freshmen and to test…

Teachers at Western Illinois University help improve the self-image of students in college remedial English courses in the following ways: (1) they try to alleviate students' feelings of failure through such methods as stressing the acceptability of spoken dialects but pointing out the practical need for writing in Standard English, and…

Since teachers have been encouraged to give attention to advertising, product advertising has been the subject of study, but because of the large amount of money spent on them, two other aspects of advertising need special attention: corporate-sponsored image (which deals with characteristics and image of the company rather than with products or…

The use of technology in teaching composition, which has increased in recent years, began with a few filmstrips on grammar. Then slide-tape presentations were used to stimulate writing, and overhead projectors helped in evaluating writing in class. Now, videocassettes are used to record commonly repeated minilectures and minilessons on spelling,…

Seven hundred and fifty compositions, randomly selected from National Assessment of Educational Progress essays written by 9-, 13- and 17-year-olds, were analyzed in a study of the skills that go into the writing of a good composition. The essays were first rated as high, medium, or low in quality. A total of 43 different indices reported or…

The study of literature in the secondary schools should not be based merely on affective and aesthetic grounds, but on cognitive and linguistic grounds as well. The facilitation of linguistic and cognitive growth can occur only in an environment that allows adolescents to experience literature on their own terms. The carefully structured,…

A semester-long high school English course brings local professionals into the classroom to help the teacher introduce students to the language arts skills associated with the working world. The five major areas of the course are composition, career interests, income tax, insurance, and goal setting. The first content area, composition, covers…