A sharp increase in the proportion of informational text with the corresponding expansion of cognitive demands and conceptual structures is a widely held explanation for the decline in reading achievement at the fourth-grade level. In this study, differences in the proportion of informational text across the second, third, and fourth grades were…

Research on persuasive writing by elementary children posits primarily a developmental perspective, claiming that elementary-age children can effectively argue through talk but not through writing. While this view is commonly held, this article presents counterevidence. Drawing on two cases of third and fourth grade children writing persuasive…

Trickster tales, with their teachings on how to behave in the world, are a powerful means for transmitting social knowledge and cultural mores to children. In this study we compared two approaches to teaching fourth-grade students to write trickster tales. Although both instructional methods incorporated aspects of the writing process approach,…

This teacher-research study examines the roles of talk and metaphorical representation in the construction of personal and social literary interpretation. Over three years, the investigator collected data from fourth-grade children's sketched interpretations about literature, their written commentaries, and conversations that occurred before,…

This article explores the writing opportunities provided to Spanish-speaking and mandarin speaking English Language Learners at the fourth and fifth-grade level across the various classroom settings in which they participated daily: an all-English speaking classroom, an English-as-a-second language (ESL) classroom, and a native-language classroom.…