Mary Brown recognised that her A-level students were finding extended writing difficult, particularly in terms of guiding the reader through the argument with appropriate "signposting". To help her students manage this, Brown devised a metaphor to represent the construction of a piece of argumentative writing which she deployed over a…

The Expository Reading and Writing Course (ERWC) was developed by California State University (CSU) faculty and high school educators to improve the academic literacy of high school seniors, thereby reducing the need for students to enroll in remedial English courses upon entering college. This report, produced by Innovation Studies at WestEd,…

Explicitly and systematically teaching strategies for planning and drafting specific types of text has improved the writing of elementary and middle school students with disabilities in previous studies. In this investigation, we examined the effect of teaching a planning and drafting strategy for persuasive writing to high school students with…

Students in UAE Model Schools exhibit poor writing skills. Samples of some of the essays they came up with bear clear evidence of the problems they have with writing in particular and place them at an increased risk for literacy failure. The data I gathered by means of questionnaires and interviews with teachers and students alike suggest that the…

Only one out of five high school teachers believes that students are learning to write well according to research from Public Agenda. Test results confirm their opinion. In 1998, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) administered a writing assessment to gauge fourth- and eighth-grade students' proficiency in writing narrative,…