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This study describes a group of seventh graders’ experiences in learning to make and share meaning about literature through the creation of visual representations. This interpretatives trategy, known as “sketch-to-stretch,” involves learners in creating symbols, pictures, and other non-linguistic signs to signify ideas generated through reading. Over the course of a school year these students used sign systems from art, mathematics, and language to express their knowledge individually and collectively. The focus of the study was to investigate the evolution of sketching in two classes and to explore how these tools helped students enrich their understanding of literature and of literacy itself. The data were analyzed by both the teacher-researchearn d the students. The study supports teachingp ractices that provide opportunities for students of all ages to make and share meaning through multiple sign systems.

This article reports results from a year-long study of the specific ways that children’s literacy practices enhanced their understanding of themselves and their social worlds in a classroom where they were encouraged to read, write, and talk about personally and socially relevant subjects. Throughout the school year the researchers documented the nature of classroom activities and the ways that they were taken up by children in their reading and writing practices. In response to various classroom activities and in relation to many out-of-school experiences, children’s reading and writing were found to function for them in a variety of personal and social ways, enabling them to understand the complex urban landscape they inhabited, to explore new roles and social identities, to wrestle with vexing social problems, and to envision ways of reconstructing their lives and their worlds. The strengths and limitations of this particular integration of action research and critical literacy are also discussed.

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This study uses the performative theory of Erving Goffman to understand the conversational roles taken on by students and teachers during college-level writing conferences. According to Goffman, both teacher and student are engaged in the performance of roles, and they cooperate so that discrepant information (revelations that might undermine these roles) are not revealed. Some of that information can come out, however, in what Goffmanc alls “backstage” areas. This study creates two “backstage” areas where both an instructor and the two students involved can listen to tapes of their conferences and provide commentary about tensions and miscommunications in the conferences. The study particularly examines confusions about terminology concerning unity in writing and the negotiation of roles in the conference. The perspective taken in this study illuminates the specific performative demands of a writing conference, suggesting that because these demands are new to some students, their teachers may need to engage in considerable role-shifting to ease the conversational burden and help the students “save face.”

This study examined the effects of three study conditions (review only, study questions, and analytic essay writing) on high school students writing and learning from text (concept application, immediate recall, delayed recall, and recall of manipulated content). An experienced social studies teacher and two levels (general and academic) of her eleventh grade U.S. history course participated in the research. Observational and case study techniques were employed to describe the teacher’s pedagogy, and then a volunteer group of students from each class read, reviewed or wrote about their reading, and were tested on learning from selected history passages. Analyses of the students’ writings indicated their varying approaches to studying and writing about the passages. Both forms of writing enabled both groups to perform better on all learning measures, with the academic students consistently outperforming the general students. Analytic writing was associated with higher scores on concept application, while study questions led to better general recall in the immediate and delayed conditions. When recall was further analyzed for the number of content units contained in the written responses to the two writing tasks, more content units appeared in the analytic writing in both the immediatea nd delayedc onditions. Although the general students’ performanceso n this posttest measure were not as strong as the academic students’ performances, they benefited more from analytic writing than from answering study questions about the history passages. Because both instructional context and academic ability seem to influence students’ performances on writing-to-learn tasks, the study suggests the need for research that will disentangle these influences to identify the effects of pedagogy and student ability on learning from writing.

This article reports on a study of the relationship between classroom context and the revisions of student writers. Specifically, the study examined the nature of the instructional context of the writing in one senior high school classroom and explored potential connections between particular features of the teacher’s approach to writing instruction and the frequency and types of revisions students in that class made to their essays. Drafts of students’ essays were coded for revisions, and results of the coding were examined with reference to specific features of the instructional method and related features of classroom context. Results of the study indicate that students in the present study, like students in some previous studies of revision, focused their revisions on surface and stylistic concerns. The study suggests that specific features of the classroom context, particularly the workshopstyle structure of the course, the interactions among students and the teacher regarding the students’ writing, and the nature of the teacher’s strategies for responding to and evaluating students’ writing, may have reinforced the teacher’s and students’ traditional views of writing quality and revision and may have thus contributed to the students’ focus on lower-level concerns in revision.

Editor’s Note: Selected, annotated bibliographies of research in the teaching of English appear in the May and December issues of RTE. In general, the items selected for inclusion in each bibliography are drawn from the dissertation abstracts in DAI and from articles or books published from July to December preceding the May issue and from January to June preceding the December issue. Annotations of items from DAI are based on the abstracts; annotations of other items are based on the full texts of those items. We ask readers to call our attention to published research we may have overlooked inadvertently and to notify us of newly published books containing research in the areas covered by the bibliography for possible inclusion in the review. Please direct questions or comments to Richard L. Larson, 30 Greenridge Ave., 5-H, White Plains, NY 10605-1237.

This paper examines the written genres of a group of six children in a first grade classroom. Using the dual lenses of sociocognitive constructivism and emergent literacy, it explores relationships among the children’s genres and between these genres and the social context of the classroom in which the children’s written discourse is situated. Analysis of naturalistic data (using an integrated functionalformal analysis which considered substance, intention, form and context as interrelated dimensions of genre) resulted in a classification scheme which encompassed all genres in the children’s writing. Analyses of the classroom discourse revealed the children to be active participants in the social dialogue within their classroom. They constructed their written genres in response to the texts with which they engaged during collaborative reading and writing tasks and in response to the ways in which the teacher structured the writing tasks. They acted upon their world by writing about their personal experiences, creating imaginary worlds through drawing and writing and playing with words and ideas. The genres the children employed came from the morning news, from stories and poems, and from genres that were embedded in their literacy environment or constructed by them in collaboration with their teacher and each other. Both constructiona nd appropriationw ere seen as active processeso n the part of the child rather than as passive imitation or copying from models.

More and more college campuses are offering one or another form of “writing-intensive” classes across the curriculum. This study investigates what students perceive to be the effects of the writing-intensive requirement at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa where students are required to take five courses designated as writing-intensive. To identify the potential composite effects of taking three or more writing-intensive classes and to identify evidence of learning that may have resulted from these multiple experiences, we interviewed 82 randomly selected seniors. Using interview transcriptions, we developed a scheme for analysis of the data. These analyses revealed several areas of self-identified improvement associated with writing-intensive classes: writing skills, knowledge acquisition, and problem-solving abilities. Students also reported that they had become better writers through interaction with their professors during the writing process, although they also reported wanting to better understand the philosophy behind writingacross- the-curriculuma nd the purposes of specific assignments. These student-reported effects of writing-intensive classes support the notion that writing can play an important part in learning.

This study investigated the effects of writing models on students’ writing of research texts. The models used by participants varied in quality and in labeling cues. Ninety-five psychology majors were given basic facts, including relevant and irrelevant information, for writing a Method Section for one of two experiments. The control group (N = 22) saw no models. The models groups (N =73) saw three student-written Method sections—either 3 good models (AAA) or 1 good, 1 moderate, and 1 poor model (ABC). Half of each quality group saw the models labeled with grades; the other half saw them unlabeled. Following holistic ratings of the students’ texts, the texts were analyzed for content. The models groups’ texts were rated as better organized than those of the control group. The models also influenced text content. Seeing a proposition in the models increased the likelihood that students would include it in their texts, with the effect being smaller for propositions that appeared only in moderate or poor models. For the writing topic deemed more difficult, the models group included more topical information than the control group, including more essential propositions but also more unnecessary propositions. No systematic benefits emerged from labeling the models or from providing only good models. Students seemed able to judge the relative quality of the models, even without labels. Overall, providing models seems to increase the salience of the topical information considered by student writers for inclusion in their texts

A newly developed instrument, the Literary Response Questionnaire (LRQ), provides scales that measure seven different aspects of readers’ orientation toward literary texts: Insight, Empathy, Imagery Vividness, Leisure Escape, Concern with Author, Story-Driven Reading, and Rejection of Literary Values. The present report presents evidence that each of these scales possesses satisfactory internal consistency, retest reliability, and factorial validity. Also, a series of five studies provided preliminary evidence that each scale may be located in a theoretically plausible network of relations with certain global personality traits (e.g., Absorption), with aspects of cognitive style (e.g., Regression in the Service of the Ego), and with some of the learning skills that are relevant to effective work in the classroom (e.g., Elaborative Processing). In a variety of teaching and research settings, the LRQ may be a useful measure of individual differences in readers’ orientation toward literary texts.

This essay examines English teaching practices in American rural schools from 1900-1940, with a special emphasis on rural schools in Iowa. The essay begins with an overview of rural education, focusing first on the “rural school problem” of the early 20th century and going on to discuss the Country Life Movement, a movement that proposed significant reforms for rural education and rural living. A survey of English teaching practices undertaken in the spirit of the Country Life Movement completes the descriptive text. The essay concludes with an assessment of the Country Life Movement and a discussion of its implications for current educational reform in American schools.

This study examined how 6 low-income children developed alphabetic knowledge in two different instructional settings, skills-based and whole language. Three learners from each setting were matched on their level of literacy experience at the beginning of kindergarten and on their level of achievement at the end of first grade. They were observed twice a week in their regular kindergarten and first grade classroom contexts. All 6 children learned alphabetic concepts and skills necessary for successful reading and writing, and the pattern of acquisition was similar across the two year period in both instructional settings despite differences in the pace of the children’s acquisition of alphabetic knowledge. The learners in the skills-based classroom acquired alphabetic knowledge primarily through reading basals and writing from teacher prompts. The children in the whole language classroom acquired the same knowledge reading self-selected literature and writing texts with self-selected topics. Both instructional settings provided explicit phonics instruction (albeit contextualized differently), and both settings provided time for children to read self-selected books and to write. These common components may be necessary in beginning literacy instructional programs.

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