This study was designed to add to the knowledge bases of teaching and professional development. It is a phenomenological study of the classroom teacher and a group of seven elementary school teachers who reflected upon, wrote about, and discussed their lives as classroom teachers over a one-year period. Teachers kept written diaries which…

The term "value added" refers to the assessment of the amount of learning that takes place during the college years. Two experiments, Value Added I and Value Added II, attempted to measure college students' attainment of eight liberal education objectives: (1) writing ability; (2) analytical ability; (3) sensitivity to ethics, morals,…

Nine selected papers presented at the Texas Writing Research Group's 1981 conference are offered in this collection. The papers discuss (1) sources of linguistic interference among American minorities; (2) contributions of discourse analysis to composition; (3) emerging notions of heuristic (investigative), eristic (controversial), and protreptic…

Focusing on both the theoretical and practical aspects of teaching children and adolescents to write effectively, the papers in this report originated as speeches delivered at a conference on English and language arts instruction. The 12 papers deal with the following topics: the composing process as communication, the cognitive and biological…

An examination of writing readiness (the state of being ready to write with a reasonable chance of success) across grade levels has revealed some developmental stages involved in writing and has indicated the role of intention in writing. The analysis has begun at grade two, since younger children's writing is greatly affected by their…

This paper analyzes short stories written in English and French by French immersion pupils at the Grade 3 level. Their English writing skills are compared to those of Grade 3 pupils in a regular English program. Aspects of their writing skills which are examined include vocabulary skills, technical skills (punctuation, capitalization and…

An experimental study compared the instructional effectiveness of Logo programming, commercially available software designed to aid composition and problem solving, and traditional teaching methods for low socioeconomic status first-grade students. Both software environments enhanced problem solving performance for a novel task, but Logo was most…

English writing ability of Hispanic college candidates taking the College Board's English Composition Test (ECT) was studied. The performance of three groups on essay and multiple choice portions of the ECT were compared with each other and with performance on the same measures by ECT test takers as a whole. (Author/DWH)

This paper analyses the influence of age on the acquisition of English as a third language by focusing on the development of general proficiency in English by school children. Participants were 60 secondary school students who had studied English for 6 years but started learning it at different ages. All participants completed a battery of tests…

Studied Spanish-speaking students in Puerto Rico to determine the resulting interaction process when two second language (L2) students are involved in peer revision of written texts. Results reveal a complex interactive process and highlight the importance of activating cognitive processes through social interaction in the second-language writing…

Ten states participated in a cross-state scoring workshop in 1991, evaluating writing from elementary school, middle school, and high school students. Correlation of scores assigned by readers from one state with those from readers from another state were generally quite high. Implications for defining common standards are discussed. (SLD)

Describes a study of fifth graders that investigated whether types of revision and quality of writing vary for bilingual and monolingual students when using word processors as compared with paper and pencil. Topics discussed include keyboarding skills, bilingualism, and language art skills. (Contains 27 references.) (LRW)

Investigates differences in the rhetorical organization of research article introductions between Korean academic writing and English academic writing based on Swales' Create a Research Space model (1990). Twelve published articles written by Korean national scholars and American scholars are compared, and eight term papers by Korean…

Discusses results of an action research project done in a Grade 4 classroom. Students were taught to provide verbal feedback on compositions written by their peers. Results suggest that elementary students were not only able to provide constructive peer feedback but also that they succeeded in improving the quality of their compositions after…

A study of undergraduates found that grades, class year, focused academic library activities, informal faculty interaction, active course learning, and conscientious writing resulted in gains in critical thinking, suggesting that academic librarians should design library-research-skills courses to increase student-focused use of the library and…