In teaching a research-writing unit, the author has asked her students to research and write a persuasive speech, a multigenre paper, an I-Search, a historical and comparative connection to literature, a country brochure, and a social criticism essay. While she found benefits and disadvantages in all of these assignments, the author was…

In much of the literature on the exploitation of corpora for language learning, the learners are viewed as researchers, who formulate and test their own hypotheses about language use. Having identified difficulties encountered in corpus investigations by our intermediate-level students of Italian in a previous study, we have designed a…

This article aims to help teachers looking for an exciting major unit designed to help their students meet educational standards in these areas: (1) library research skills, (2) preparing and writing a standard, (3) research paper, in this case on a significant figure in world history, (4) writing a creative story, including adaptation of…

Eighth-grade teacher Lesley Roessing designed an assignment that makes individual student research useful and accessible to the entire class. She outlines steps students take to create a guide to supplement their reading of "Waiting for the Rain: A Novel of South Africa." She then builds on the research experience in another unit by addressing…

This article describes a combination of a research essay and a creative writing assignment that encourages rigorous academic research while allowing students to get "outside the box" of traditional academic research papers. This assignment has five steps. The first two steps offer the chance to introduce academic research along with summary and…

Presents five short teaching tips written by five different authors on the following topics: newspapers, writing exercises for aspiring elementary school teachers, telephone directory as research tool, structured essay assignments, and teaching description with Raymond Carver's "Cathedral." (TB)

In most schools, the term "arts" represents visual arts (art appreciation, painting, clay, etc.), performing arts (including music, dance, and theater), creative writing, and media arts (i.e., photography, digital video, and traditional filmmaking). "Theater" and "drama" are often used interchangeably, but "theater" comprises all of the technical…

This article describes the "Add-a-Page Assignment" in which students choose a picture book to which they would add a page, imitating both the style and artistic medium of the illustrator and the writing style of the author. In this article, the author begins with quotes from students who have very different learning styles and vastly different…