Research on the relationship between syntactic complexity and quality of written composition was reviewed to test the assumption that these two concepts are positively related. The studies reviewed, which have appeared during the past 15 years, fall into two broad categories: (1) intervention studies designed to increase syntactic complexity and…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with the following topics: (1) the adolescent writer's developing sense of audience; (2) the entry skills, methods, and attitudes of intermediate composition students in postsecondary composition programs; (3)…

Three high school students present findings of their survey of professional writers' training, influences, and writing processes conducted to judge whether secondary school writing programs adequately prepare high schoolers for writing in the future. Comments from writers emphasized prewriting, inspiration, reader feedback, and sequential drafts.…

Reviews research on reading and writing development, comparing the whole-language approach with the Montessori approach for teaching reading and writing at the elementary school level. Also discusses techniques to teach students how to write poetry and short fiction, stressing the importance of both freedom and structure in evolving reading and…

As part of a larger project, a ninth-grade class participated in a year-long exchange of writing with students in an inner-city London classroom. The larger project involved 10 San Francisco Bay Area sixth- through ninth-grade classes exchanging writing with nine inner-city London classes and a Swedish class. Students and teachers in each of the…

This annotated bibliography contains 32 citations of journal articles, book chapters, and books that focus on the teaching of writing in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) and English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) classrooms. (MDM)

A study examined the transition from dependent writing (dictation) to independent writing for 40 first grade students. Specifically, the study investigated (1) how, in terms of common quantitative language units (mean words per t-unit, mean number of dependent clauses, words per maze, mean number of dependent clauses per t-unit, and length in…

The essays in this book address various cognitive and emotional dimensions of disrupted composing and describe some of the situational variables that can contribute to it. The titles and authors are as follows: "Blocking and the Young Writer" (Donald H. Graves); "Emotional Scenarios in the Writing Process: An Examination of Young…

One of the tasks for the British National Curriculum Council has been to identify steps toward proficiency in the English language and, on that basis, issue descriptions of appropriate progress for students at each level and stage. There is a danger that teachers may view these steps as a linear sequence of accomplishments, each to be achieved in…

Faithfully following a fixed set of procedures has long been standard practice in writing resumes. This process produces a passable document with a minimum of effort expended. There are, however, advantages to be gained from taking a conceptual approach to resume preparation. First, it can help provide a framework for these procedures, giving the…

This is the first of two related documents reporting a study that analyzed the text of 26 student-teacher dialogue journals from a sixth grade class as a developmental link between students' natural competence in oral conversation and their developing competence in written language. The first section of the report discusses (1) the purpose of the…

The New Brunswick Writing Assessment Program implemented in grades five, eight, and eleven in New Brunswick (Canada) public schools in 1978 is described in this report, which includes the specific assignments for each grade, a discussion of the general holistic scoring approach used, and characteristics of the responses at each grade, including…

A year-long study of the writing growth of eight seventh grade children was conducted to determine whether knowledge of reading rhetoric could be directly applied to personal writing behavior. It was assumed that active comprehension of a distinctive literary model would provide awareness of the structure of narrative prose and improve the…

The study described in this paper was designed to compare the composing processes of three black adolescent females--a low, a moderate, and a high user of nonstandard dialect. After explaining the procedures used in selecting the subjects on the basis of their degree of usage of nonstandard dialect features, the paper describes the research…

Presents the first year findings of a three-year longitudinal collaborative research project which focuses on one teacher's professional growth as he moves from a product-oriented to a process-oriented approach to teaching writing. (JK)