This report discusses the effectiveness of strategy-based writing instruction for adolescents with language-based learning disabilities. The instruction is being provided to Canadian students in grade eight who are at least two grade equivalents below their peers in reading and writing ability. The students are taught a paraphrasing strategy that can be applied to the writing as well as the reading of expository texts. Students are immersed in reading and writing activities within their zone of proximal development and guided in the application of the paraphrasing strategy in order to scaffold their reading and writing development. The aim is to begin to redress the cumulative deficit that these students experience in language and school-based literacy, and also to provide practical tools that they can use in their courses across the regular grade-eight curriculum. This report begins by briefly describing the curricular, instructional, and social contexts of the "Foundations 8" classroom and how the writing strategy instruction was situated, or contextually embedded, within the classroom processes. Preliminary findings of the students' perceptions about their writing indicate they prefer to write on the computer and that students who wrote their essays longhand used more strategic stopping. (Contains 15 references and 2 tables.) (CR)