Included in this guide are strategies for helping struggling secondary readers and writers so that they will develop the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) necessary to write successfully and have greater access to the general curriculum. It focuses on the writing process because research supports the efficacy of the writing process as a…

The emptiness and nothingness associated with writer's block is often described as a kind of death, a place where there is nothing to decide, nothing about which to express an opinion. However, for students who enter the writing classroom from a different culture, the problem may not be lack of ideas, but conflicting ideas. Some of these students…

This book shows how teachers and specialists can be better informed about students' reading and writing abilities by observing students engaged in the processes of reading and writing than by administering isolated tests. The book demonstrates where traditional approaches to assessment fail and how to better help struggling students. Each chapter…

A review of 38 articles published from 1990 to 2000 on college students with learning disabilities and writing difficulties (LD/WD) found four major topics were discussed: available assistive technology; effectiveness of assistive technology; characteristics and error patterns in the writings of college students with LD/WD; and instructional…

A case study with two Finnish 10-year-old boys evaluated an intervention designed to promote the spelling skills of students with severe writing difficulties. The intervention comprised strategy instruction, procedural facilitation, and computer-assisted tutoring. Participants showed gains in spelling accuracy, spelling revision skills, decoding…

Describes a laboratory course in developmental psychology as an example of teaching undergraduate students thinking and writing skills. Lists different written and oral communication employed: scientific experimental report writing, sequential and topical protocols of infant behavior, blooper examination responses, and oral presentations.…

This article explains the Integrated Strategies Instruction Model by analyzing the problems of ineffective writers and presenting instructional techniques for framing, applying, and extending students' understanding of the executive strategy. A vignette from an eighth-grade history classroom illustrates the guidelines. Research regarding the…

Suggests ways in which faculty advisors in racially integrated high schools can recruit minority students for the newspaper staff. Recommends looking for interested students in classes and asking colleagues to do the same and doing away with widespread misconceptions and relaxing some rules and regulations about participation in journalism…

This paper reviews research indicating that children use images to improve comprehension and production of text; argues that images and sounds can effectively bring children's cultures into the classroom; and studies how eight elementary children used a multimedia composing environment, focusing on the nature of their preferred symbol systems and…

A second grade teacher describes how a difficult student with learning disabilities blossomed over the course of the school year. The article examines her whole class approach and presents strategies for including such a student in creative writing activities. (SM)

Describes a study of changes in attitudes and writing performance of learning-disabled (LD) college students resulting from a mainstream writing class employing a workshop format and microcomputer word processors. The LD students' performance level was consistent with the non-LD students in the class, and their writing attitudes improved. (DMM)

This article presents six principles designed to prevent writing difficulties as well as to build writing skills: providing effective writing instruction, tailoring instruction to meet the individual needs, intervening early, expecting that each child will learn to write, identifying and addressing roadblocks to writing, and employing…

Discusses the efficacy of a Writers' Workshop (WW) approach for promoting writing skills and writing self-efficacy in fourth- and fifth-grade learning-disabled students who had significant writing deficits. Compares various outcomes from WW students with outcomes of students with significant writing deficits who were exposed to a "writing across…

Twenty-eight experienced English language professionals were surveyed regarding the degree of difficulty students with deafness with and without learning disabilities might have in dealing with 30 specific English language phenomena. Spelling knowledge and a variety of English discourse, lexical, syntactic, and morphological phenomena emerged as…

Reading and writing deficits in two multilingual speakers of Kannada, Hindi and English are described. Disorders of the two patients (Mr G and Ms S) had different etiologies. Mr G had severe alexia with agraphia in English as well as in Kannada and Hindi. Ms S exhibited dissociation across the languages, showing symptoms of surface dyslexia in…