In recent years effective instruction in reading for learners with physical and educational disabilities has received great attention in the schools. However, instruction in the corollary skill of writing has received considerably less emphasis. This review paper notes that through the use of assistive technology, students with a variety of…

This is a qualitative case study of two students' composing processes as they developed a documentary video about the Dominican Republic in an urban, public middle school classroom. While using a digital video editing program, the students moved across multiple media (the Web, digital video, books, and writing), drawing semiotic resources from…

This textbook presents a fifth-grade composition course stressing the different forms of language exercises--letters, narratives, descriptions, and expositions. This series of books aims to help the teacher by providing a systematic arrangement of subject-matter, thus saving the labor of searching for suitable material and, at the same time,…

Writing is difficult for students who are learning English, as they often struggle to express what they really want to say. Writing is difficult for their teachers, too, who often struggle to respond in ways that are helpful. In this article, the authors offer an approach that looks at students' writing from a functional linguistics perspective,…

This article focuses on a collaborative project between two fifth-grade dual language teachers (English-Spanish) and a university researcher as they engaged children in a study of memoir. The bilingual children in these classes cultivated their genre knowledge by participating in the ways of writers of memoir through the careful adaptations the…

Grounded in sociocultural theory, this study uses an ecological approach to examine how student interactions within a dual-language school context may offer affordances for increased linguistic and conceptual understanding. Using qualitative analysis of student discourse, this paper focuses on data from recorded interactions between pairs of…

This article presents several winning activities for students in the classroom. These activities include: (1) making Abraham Lincoln costumes; (2) creating frosty scenes from torn-paper collage for a grammar activity; (3) listening to Dr. Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech; (4) hosting an architectural challenge for a kindergarten class;…

We examined the differential effects of the social cognitive model of sequential skill acquisition (SCM intervention) and the self-regulated strategy development model (SRSD intervention) for writing. One hundred and twenty-one 5th- and 6th-grade Spanish students with learning disabilities (LD) and/or low achievement (LA) were randomly assigned…

This article begins with a "snapshot" of a fifth grade writing workshop and its study of op-ed writing to show an inquiry in action. The framework for this inquiry involves immersing students in reading multiple examples of the kind of text the teacher would like them to write, studying closely how the texts are crafted, and writing their own…

The statement "Learning Is Both an Active and Reflective Practice" is very relevant to the authors elementary artroom, where students are encouraged to think about what they are making, to experiment with ideas, and to ask questions of themselves. Art students in grades three through five use digital cameras, computers, PowerPoint, and reflective…

Writing is a powerful social tool that offers students opportunities to chisel their identities as they position themselves and others on issues and beliefs (Dyson, 1992). This article presents the story of how Mark, a fifth-grade student who resisted writing in certain classroom contexts, used positional writing practices to shape his identities.…

Make writing less of a task and more of an adventure through this creative and imaginative collection of writing prompts, targeted at grade levels 2 to 5. It provides not only ideas and inspiration, but also motivation. This book includes: (1) Story Headers: single pictures with story titles that kids write about; (2) Every Picture Tells a Story:…

This study systematically analyzed social and cognitive processes that underlie the development of argumentative knowledge. Group discussions of controversial issues and explicit instruction in argumentation were expected to help students acquire a sense of the overall structure of an argument, or an argument schema. In a quasi-experiment, 128…

"Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition"[R] ("CIRC") is a comprehensive reading and writing program for students in grades 2 through 8. It includes story-related activities, direct instruction in reading comprehension, and integrated reading and language arts activities. Pairs of students (grouped either by or across…

In this paper, the role of computers in writing process was investigated. Last 25 years of journals were searched to find related articles. Articles and books were classified under prewriting, composing, and revising and editing headings. The review results showed that computers can make writers' job easy in the writing process. In addition,…