Focusing on children's production of written language, a two-year study, conducted on the Oodham (Papago) Indian Reservation in Arizona, explored social context, linguistic systems, and the creation of meaning as aspects of the writing process. Ten American Indian children in third and fourth grade provided over 200 stories that formed the basic…

Evaluating the longitudinal effects of a 5-year secondary school composition curriculum, a study investigated students' perceptions of their ability to use essay-level and syntax-level skills. Student questionnaires provided perception, definition, and usefulness data about the curriculum. Results showed that 3 years elapsed before students became…

A study investigated how a teaching approach that emphasized literature would affect children's writings and help them to apply elements of form and content. Six first grade classes in a rural Newfoundland school district participated in the study; the students performed similarly on overall readiness. The class randomly selected as the…

The impact of an outreach program modeled after the Berkeley Bay Area Writing Project was studied. Both projects emphasize the role of expert teachers as teacher trainers for the purpose of improving student writing. The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) program targets teachers of traditionally underserved students. Data sources…

Sentences are understood by outlining associative relations between the concepts representing the meanings of the words. When the words are received the activation spreads from their conceptual counterparts to the other concepts in memory, so that some implicit thoughts are often added to the mental representation of a sentence. As sentences are…

The second phase of a 3-year project examining the effect of a process approach to writing instruction on students' expository reading and writing skills, a study determined the impact of three writing programs that emphasized different aspects of a process-oriented writing environment. Data were gathered from 159 fifth and sixth grade students…

Noting that reading and writing should be interactive in the same way that listening and learning to speak are interactive, this report describes several teaching methods designed to integrate the teaching of reading and writing on elementary and secondary levels. The first section examines the use of dialogue journals in a third and fourth grade…

A qualitative study explored the nature of the writing process for graduate students. Research questions were what students' perceptions of the writing process is; whether students think learning to write better has value in their careers; how graduate students learn the writing process; and in what ways a course in writing for publication is…

English-as-a-Second-Language university students in a multiple-draft composition setting were found to pay more attention to teachers' comments on preliminary drafts than on final drafts; pay most attention to comments on grammar; and consider teachers' comments helpful overall. Problems with teacher comments and implications of the study are…

To gain insight into why students frequently misunderstand their teachers' written responses to compositions, this paper looks in depth at one promising ninth grade student's processing of teacher written comments in a response-rich classroom, considering the larger learning contexts that impinge on the student's interpretations. The various…

Intended to chart the interconnections of linguistics, stylistics, and the teaching of composition, this book encourages a productive collective effort to cultivate linguistics among teachers of writing. Chapter titles and their authors are as follows: (1) "Grammar in American College Composition: An Historical Overview" (R. J. Connors);…

A study investigated the writing of incipient bilinguals (students who were in the initial process of acquiring a second language). A total of four Latino children were chosen for final, in-depth study over a 2 year-period at three middle schools in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Data included initial interviews and observations,…

Discusses one student's persistence in misunderstanding her teacher's written comments on her papers. Notes that student and teacher bring different sets of information, skills, and values to each written response episode, and that mismatched expectations can occur even with high-achieving students. (SKC)