Dialogue journals, in which students write messages to the classroom teacher and then read the teacher's responses, help deaf and hearing-impaired students build and improve their writing and reading skills. Teachers should use natural, conversational language, let students introduce topics, and share their personal feelings and experiences to…

THE FOLLOWING IS THE FULL TEXT OF THIS DOCUMENT: Have you ever had trouble getting children to write stories? One technique that works well is group writing. (1) Divide the class into groups of five or six. (2) Give each child in a group a mimeographed copy of a story starter--just a sentence or an opening paragraph. (3) Have the children read the…

Presents a classroom activitiy in which students scored each others papers using a holistic technique. Explains the benefits of holistic scoring. (FL)

Uses the form of a Socratic dialogue to discuss the advantages of writers' workshops for students. Suggests classroom strategies and grading procedures. (EL)

This teaching guide urges the use of sentence combining as a technique to improve both the reading and the writing of students. The guide offers practical activities in sentence combining in forms that will make classroom teaching more interesting for the instructor and elicit more productive work from the student. The guide is divided into the…

Suggests using the writing folder for such reasons as gaining an improved description and assessment of individual growth in writing, getting a better descriptive picture of writing achievement within the class, and assisting teachers in improving their assessment of writing. (EL)

Discusses two upper division writing-intensive courses, Sociological Theory and Sociology of Religion, offered at Millsaps College (Mississippi). Argues that greater emphasis on writing in the upper-division sociology courses allows students to become better learners and better sociologists. (DB)

This guide for teachers of grades 3 through 8 provides a collection of self-directed projects for either individuals or small groups. Suitable for use in classroom learning centers, the guide is divided into 7 sections. Section 1, Working with Literature, offers activities for teaching reading using novels, student-made novel packets, fiction…

Outlines a multistep writing program in which English as a second language students participate in the writing process and relate to their fellow writers (classmates and teachers) in various ways, using journals, learning logs, and essays. The extent to which activities increase writing proficiency and reduce students' writing apprehension is…

This book offers high school and college teachers both a philosophy of composition instruction and an immediately useful set of classroom-tested teaching ideas distilled from the author's 28 years of teaching writing. Throughout the book, two aims underlie all others: (1) to tap every student's inborn ability to think extensively and well; and (2)…

Using the newspaper to provide opportunities for students to learn current events and further develop writing skills is described. Seven activities outline how to use cooperative learning to teach current events. Four types of assignments based on newspapers develop various types of writing skills: (1) personal writing; (2) descriptive writing;…

This course is intended to teach students enrolled in an adult high school diploma program one method for composing a short (five-paragraph) essay that can be used in situations where writing is part of a qualifying test, such as the General Educational Development (GED) exam. The course also offers background information about the GED writing…

A simple, but useful, handout given to mothers of young children can greatly increase the likelihood that they will present aspects of emergent literacy in their homes. The concept of emergent literacy states that all literacy learning begins in infancy and proceeds forward from that point, and that all of the literacy skills of oral language,…

Contributed by high school English teachers across the United States, the activities contained in this booklet are intended to promote the effective teaching of English and the language arts. Activities in the first section of the booklet focus on language exploration--the subtle nuances of meaning, rhythm in poetry, and the power of the…

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…