This paper describes a collaborative relationship between a community member and an eighth grade English teacher that was documented through an ethnographic study during an entire school year. The community member taught a weekly poetry workshop where students are encouraged to take risks in their writing and also take a critical stance towards…

For the last several years, composition scholarship has unfortunately neglected the paragraph. Theories about it, however, have a rich history. Eventually, it involved conflicts between prescriptivists and descriptivists, as well as between members of the latter group and the branch of descriptivism called functionalism. In this article, the…

Many K-6 teachers and students still think of mathematics as a totally separate subject from literacy. Yet incorporating math content into the language arts block helps students gain skills for reading many kinds of texts. Bringing reading, writing, and talking into the math classroom supports the development of conceptual knowledge and problem…

Research has revealed how students draw upon other texts when writing their own texts. This article explores how the writing of Alyssa, a 10-year-old Grade 5 student, was influenced by her engagement with literature with Radical Change characteristics, as well as by her knowledge of and experience with other texts. Dresang's Radical Change…

This textbook provides the foundation for an elementary English course that combines grammar and composition. It is especially useful for ungraded schools. This book is an attempt to bring the subject of language home to children at the age when knowledge is acquired in an objective way, by practice and habit, rather than by the study of rules and…

Inservice programs should involve language arts teachers in actual reading and writing. (DD)

Describes a writing exercise in which students are asked to write questions to be submitted to a hypothetical computer. Suggestions for subsequent activities are provided. (TO)

Article gives suggestions for conducting a Writer's Workshop (speaking, listening, writing and reading) in schools. (AF)

An examination of the writing of an elementary school student shows how students' revisions in their papers and complete rewrites of them are indications of their writing development. (DD)

Many students and teachers find creative writing to be too complex to manage. Teachers are unable to identify ways to help students develop necessary skills through creative writing. Teachers can make writing manageable by giving children opportunities that isolate, compartmentalize, and focus on specific aspects of the writer's craft. (Author/NQ)

Inquiry-based science instruction can provide a rich context in which to build literacy skills in the elementary grades. The authors discuss the benefits of incorporating reading, writing, and speaking into science instruction. They describe the results of research on two models for combining language arts and science--the Science IDEAS model and…

Many approaches to literacy instruction treat language as an object of study. The curricular assumptions that inform such instruction are that language is located outside the person, extracted from context, neutral, and explicable through defined rules. An underlying assumption in many language arts classrooms is that children will not pay…

Relates poetry to journalism, as a kind, or several kinds, of reporting with several of the author's own poems illustrating the thesis. Suggestions for stimulating student poetry writing are given. (TO)