The identification of critical writing skills was the first step in a project designed to specify language skills that should be included in instruments for assessing students' entry into and exit from bilingual classrooms. Writing skills were screened according to three criteria: appearance on state or local competency lists, textbook emphasis,…

Some of the errors in selected areas of English grammar and lexis made by a sample of 100 first year college students from Madhya Pradesh, India, were investigated. The errors of students are described in linguistic terms, and some of the probable sources of errors are explained. The rules of grammar and usage that should be established to help…

This is one in a series of eight discussion pamphlets produced by the Writing Across the Curriculum Project dealing with some of the issues connected with writing in the schools and their relation to learning. The eight papers in the pamphlet were drawn from a seminar involving 11 geography, history, and English teachers and are concerned with…

The language performance and experiences of four eleventh grade Canadian vocational students were examined over six weeks in four individual interviews and four group discussion sessions. Additional data were collected by observing the students in their English classes and work situations. These case studies revealed the following: student…

A DESCRIPTION OF SPECIFIC PROCEDURES FOLLOWED IN TEACHING A HIGH SCHOOL "CREATIVE WRITING" COURSE IS NEEDED BECAUSE COURSES BEARING THAT NAME ARE VARIOUSLY CONCEIVED BY TEACHERS AND ADMINISTRATORS AND VARIOUSLY INTERPRETED BY SUPPORTERS AND CRITICS. SUCH A COURSE SHOULD BE DESIGNED TO AVOID THE CRITICISM THAT CREATIVE WRITING FOSTERS "EASY-GOING…

Essays and reports useful to English teachers are collected under four headings: (1) "Issues and Problems" contains a 1959 report on the basic issues of teaching English, the Report of the Language Committee of the School and College Conference on English (April 1940), and the Report of the Literature Committee of the School and College Conference…

The purpose of the study was to compare the effectiveness with which composition skills could be taught by the traditional theme-assignment approach and by an experimental method using weekly multiple-choice composition tests in lieu of theme writing. The weekly tests were based on original but typical first-draft compositions and covered problems…

To determine the influences of college work in English, of teaching assignment, of size of community, and of teaching experience upon opinions about the authority for standards of English usage, secondary English teachers in Oklahoma ranked items of usage as formal written or spoken, informal written or spoken, or uncultivated or illiterate…

This collection of 10 essays is concerned with the leadership and current trends in English language teaching. Specific topics of papers are (1) W. Wilbur Hatfield as "The Pattern Maker," by James Mason, (2) Hatfield as an innovator in the teaching of literature and language, by Irwin Suloway, (3) "Changes in English Teaching in the…

This curriculum guide discusses an English program for the middle school and the junior high school. The guide is based on the premise that the study of English involves helping the student to clarify, order, interpret, and communicate his experiences through the skillful use of language. This is achieved by allowing the student to exercise oral…

Examines the effects of audience adaptation and social cognitive ability on the syntactic strategies employed by four different age groups in the writing of persuasive discourse. (EKN)

Investigated the effect of grammatical and discourse features on rater perceptions of writing quality in evaluating foreign language writing samples. Also investigated differences in rating profiles between native and nonnative speaking raters. (Author/VWL)

Explores lessons learned about adolescents' desire for community, how important teachers are in producing and maintaining community within classrooms, methods for teachers to include stories in their classrooms, and students' written and verbal responses to materials and methods used. (SD)

This paper analyses the use of the word "where" in texts written by Malay-speaking learners of English. Data from a learner corpus is compared with data from two corpora of academic writing by native English-speaker writers. Considerable over-use of "where" is found: this is explained as a consequence of various patterns of misuse of "where" and…

The decontextualized nature of literacy has been a recurrent issue in discussions of the consequences of literacy over the last twenty years. The central thesis of these discussions is that the nature of written discourse itself leads directly or indirectly to changes in cognitive processing, linguistic progressing, cultural development, and/or…