JIS English for Academic Purposes

One initial lesson for writer's notebooks is to Read Ralph Fletcher's opening story in Keeping a Writer's Notebook. It's about digging a ditch and catching all kinds of critters. He compares writer's notebooks to that ditch -- a space we dig in our busy lives to catch stuff. After reading the story, my students and I brainstorm the different kinds of things we could catch in our writer's notebooks. Then I typed the chart in a format that made it easy for students to tape it to the inside cover of their notebooks. Here's what we came up with:

Reading and Writing in the Content Areas eWorkshop: Identifying Text Structure in Informational Writing

writing genres Genre is a recognized category of works that share a common form, purpose or content. As a writer, it is important to understand what these commonly shared attributes are for each of the different genre.

Switching Gears Helping Students Move Successfully from Reading Literature to Reading in the Content Areas

This WebQuest challenges you to investigate techniques of persuasive writing and critical reading skills. It allows you to strengthen your technology skills, exercise your creativity, practice your research skills, and visit newspaper editorials to discriminate between fact from opinion.

In this activity, students "become" one of the major characters in a book and describe themselves and other characters, using lists of accurate, powerful adjectives. In class discussion, students support their lists with details from the novel.

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This would be a fun activity for writing feature articles! Fun with any kind of writing, really. . .

WHAT IS FUZZMAIL? Fuzzmail records the act of writing and lets you send it as an email. Dynamic changes, typoes, pauses and writeovers are captured and communicated. We created fuzzmail because we wanted a more emotionally expressive alternative to email, so that an emailed love letter does not have to look the same as a business letter.

Curious about how complex your documents or Web pages are to read? You don't have to get a team of experts to generate your readability score: you can just use readability.info to analyze the characteristics of your writing and ascertain a multitude of readability scores. By comparing the readability score of different documents (or Web pages) you can better hone your writing and make sure that you aren't creating overly complex sentences and paragraphs for your audience.

In this area of the website you will find information on some of the best researched and the most widely implemented methods of helping all students to learn more successfully. The information includes a description of how the teaching and learning strategies work, where they have been applied, results, and where to find further information from experts in the field, books, websites, and other resources. They have been demonstrated to be successful with students of all ages and ability levels, including those with various kinds of disabilities and those who do not learn in traditional ways. Following are links to different teaching and learning strategies, a description of how they work, where they have been applied, results, and where to find more information from individuals, books, web sites, and other resources.