Standardized literacy assessments that place emphasis on testing and attainment of results have caused many students, particularly in middle years schooling to be disenfranchised by literacy teaching and learning practices. This study employed an action research methodology to investigate whether an outdoor learning experience in a Year 7/8…

Much of the special education research on writing has focused on skill acquisition and remediation. However, a significant problem with this approach is that it does not account for the sociocultural nature of writing or the importance of culturally sustaining pedagogies in writing instruction. In this article, the author uses practitioner…

As part of its proposal to the U.S. Department of Education, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) committed to developing model content frameworks for English language arts/literacy (ELA/Literacy) to serve as a bridge between the Common Core State Standards and the PARCC assessments. The Model Content…

Describes methods of teaching summarizing skills to seventh graders. Notes that the English teachers at the middle school were quite surprised that their students did not know how to summarize effectively. (RS)

Describes using the newspaper with seventh-grade English students to teach real-life reading and writing skills as well as the essential elements on the TAAS (an exit exam). (SR)

Suggestions for teaching writing to students in grades seven and eight range from student journals to spelling bingo and other writing games. (DD)

This textbook is targeted at educators teaching students the seventh year in spoken and written English. Its objectives are: (1) a full development of the sentence sense, including the ability to analyze commonly used grammatical constructions and to discriminate accurately between dependent clauses and sentences; (2) reasonable skill in writing…

The first section of this paper discusses the sentence combining approach to teaching writing and includes illustrations of sentence combining problems. The second section describes a program in which the sentence combining approach was used with low ability seventh graders in an inner-city junior high school. Among the benefits of the program…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether different methods of English instruction would produce significant differences in students' ability to write as well as to recognize satisfactory writing. During the first quarter of the school year, 731 students at the seventh and nine grade levels were taught by one of three teaching methods…

THE SEVENTH- AND EIGHTH-GRADE UNITS CONTAINED IN THIS GUIDE PROVIDE A SEQUENTIAL STUDY OF COMPOSITION WITH EMPHASIS UPON DICTION. THE SEVENTH-GRADE UNIT (10 LESSONS) DEALS WITH THE PROCESSES OF OBSERVATION, CLASSIFICATION, INDIVIDUALIZATION, REVISION, AND WITH AUTHOR INTENTION. THE EIGHT-LESSON UNIT FOR THE EIGHTH-GRADE IS CONCERNED WITH WRITING…

To determine the effects of peer tutoring on tutors and tutees in middle school English classes, a study was conducted using pretest and posttest data of 120 students in a Mississippi middle school gathered from the following: (1) the California Achievement Test, 1977 Edition, Forms C and D; (2) teacher-assigned grades in English classes; (3)…

The purpose of this pilot study was to collect information on the feasibility of designing a controlled experimental project to test the effectiveness of a new grammar called "sector analysis" on improving student writing. The fourth, seventh, and ninth grade materials used in this study were based on this new approach to teaching…

Written in terms of behavioral objectives, the teaching strategies in this guide are divided into nine areas: the parts of speech, the basic sentence pattern, literary genre and their elements, composition, creative writing, vocabulary development, literature, library systems, and punctuation. Following each stated objective are suggested…

This work is one of a series of collections of objectives and measurement items from several subject areas based upon curricular material either submitted by teachers, schools, and school districts, or generated by the Instructional Objectives Exchange (IOX) staff. Contained in this English skills collection are 76 objectives and related…

Produced in response to a school board's directive to develop a plan for implementing a standardized curriculum in the basic subjects on a district-wide basis, this guide contains instructional objectives for the area of seventh grade language arts. Included in the guide are (1) an instructional objectives checklist providing all objectives and…