Research in the Teaching of English - Volume 28, Issue 1, 1994

The present study investigates the experiences of 17 children—all designated by school evaluators as “remedial” readers—as they interpreted and performed text through classroom theatre. Through participant observation, audio and video recording, artifacts, and interviews, the patterns of children’s text interpretation were analyzed to show how these children learned to take on the roles of actor, character, and critic in planning, performing, and evaluating their performances. As actors, the children were provided with opportunities to shoulder the “mantle of expertise,” experiencing the creative and critical features of a dramatic curriculum. As critics, the children learned to emphasize the roles of rules, resources, and the bases for common knowledge in their dramatic interpretations. As characters, they shifted perspective from self to other through voice, physical action, and connection to other characters. This year-long study details how these children moved from a perception of drama as uninhibited expression much influenced by media experiences to a perception of the bounded and negotiated nature of theatrical production influenced by careful text interpretation.

Persuasive/argumentativew riting is an importanta nd difficult mode of discourse for student writers. It is particularly problematic for non-native speakers, who often bring both linguistic and rhetorical deficits to the task of persuasion in English. This study analyzed 60 persuasive texts by university freshman composition students, half of whom were native speakers and half of whom were non-native speakers of English for 33 quantitative, topical structure, and rhetorical variables. The results showed clear differences between the essays of native and non-native speakers. These results and their implications for second language composition instruction are discussed.

This study reports the results of a three-year longitudinal evaluation of a National Writing Project site and illustrates the value of using multiple sources of data to evaluate aspects of National Writing Project sites. We examined the immediate effects of the Summer Institute by looking at teachers’ reactions to writing process Instruction both before and after the Summer Institute. We also examined longrange effects by looking at how teachers implemented the writing process in their classrooms over an extended period following Institute participation. Results indicate that during the Summer Institute teachers moved from self-oriented concerns about the writing process to concerns about how this approach would influence students and fellow teachers. Results also indicate how attendance at the Summer Institute affected classroom practice. We conclude with implications and questions for further study.

This study investigated Piagetian measures of concrete operations in relation to specific school-type tasks in an attempt to link cognitive development and school learning. We predicted that the ability to sequence (seriation) would make a unique contributiont o gradef ive childrens’ comprehensiono f a narrativec ompositiont hey read and to the organization of a narrative they wrote. We also predicted that the ability to classify would make a unique contribution to childrens’ comprehension of a comparative exposition and to the organization of their own written comparisons. Two group sessions were conducted to collect narrative and comparative compositions from 65 children. Results indicated that seriation ability was especially relevant to the organization of temporal and causal relationships in their reading and writing of narratives and that classification ability was especially relevant to the organization of similarities and differences in their reading and writing of comparisons. However, analysis also suggested that development of the theoretically relevant cognitive abilities is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for high levels of performance in reading and writing. Moreover, relatively low correlations between reading and writing within the two genres studied suggested support for the view that reading and writing represent somewhat different sets of skills and that there are still other important skills specific to reading or writing.