Contextualized teaching and learning (CTL), or the concept of relating subject matter content to meaningful situations that are relevant to students' lives, offers one promising approach to helping students learn more effectively. This brief offers instructors, college leaders, policy makers and funders a high-level summary of the CTL…

Summarizes 10 basic exam questions relating to distance, direction, time, and world interest that have confounded college freshmen entering a professor's geography classes over the past 15 years. Students bewildered by the pretest usually did not pass or even finish his course. Also, foreign students performed better than American students. (MLH)

Presents sentence-combining exercises that can help basic writing students to produce correct surface-structure transformations in their writing. (HTH)

Enthusiasm for the introduction of computer-based skills needs to be tempered by a realistic assessment of what is possible and desirable within the context of a balanced geography degree. To help teachers identify an appropriate role for computing in the undergraduate geography curriculum, a ladder of computing skills is outlined. (Author/RM)

To do academic work, basic writers must know how to use the forms that express mature thinking. Accustomed to the demands of speech, basic writers often rely on unspecified context to relate ideas, thus failing to establish the connections evident in well-developed thought. While able to use certain cohesive ties such as repetitions,…

Outlines a basic writing skills course organized around the process of transcribing reading and lecture notes from students' other classes. (HTH)

In a "College English" article, B. M. Kroll describes the educational and philosophical foundations of three perspectives on the teaching of writing: interventionism, maturationism, and interactionism. These three developmental perspectives offer a useful way of reviewing, evaluating, and classifying textbooks written for basic writers.…

Describes a student-centered software package designed at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin to support student writing by helping students generate ideas, improve organization and development, and improve editing capabilities. Describes UT's basic writers and presents findings from the classroom research-based program evaluation. (DMM)

Acknowledging the need for objective evaluation of the focus and organization of the basic speech communication course, this paper reviews the progress of the basic course by tracing its changes and development. The first portion of the paper discusses the evolution of the basic course from the 1950s to the present, giving specific attention to…

The computer applications that hold most promise for writers form a large class of utility programs, including word processing and text editing. However, the computer can pose some problems for the student in the writing center. What proportion of writing center students arrive ready to work at the keyboard? Will learning to type present special…

Presents insights that the Oral Proficiency Testing Program of the Foreign Service Institute can give writing teachers and focuses specifically on how these insights can help them to identify and articulate appropriate objectives for basic writing courses and to develop curricula appropriate to those objectives. (EL)

A cross-disciplinary project at the University of South Alabama has been successful in improving the technical competence of undergraduate writers in all academic fields. For the geography department, this project has involved developing courses which teach writing as part of the thinking process and problem-solving method. While instructors have…

The articles in this journal issue examine the characteristics of student writing apprehension, and teaching methods to alleviate it. The titles of the articles and their authors are as follows: (1) "Writing Anxiety: Reasons and Reduction Techniques" (Helen R. Heaton and Pauline M. Pray); (2) "Writing Anxiety and the Gifted Student…

The concept of transfer, which refers to the brain's ability to generalize or situations in which perceptions and behaviors are generalizable, can be of use to teachers of English as a second language (ESL) students and basic writers. What is called "writing across the curriculum" and most classroom writing instruction are based on unexamined…

James Joyce's use of interior monologue (the interior self of the character is given directly, as though the reader were overhearing an articulation of the stream of thought and feeling flowing through the character's mind) can help basic writers in developmental classes. Students can be given excerpts from Joyce and asked to turn the sentence…