Mentor Texts


Book Description

It's been a decade since Lynne Dorfman and Rose Cappelli wrote the first edition of Mentor Texts and helped teachers across the country make the most of high-quality children's literature in their writing instruction. In the second edition of this important book Lynne and Rose show teachers how to help students become confident, accomplished writers by using literature as their foundation. The second edition includes brand-new "Your Turn Lessons," built around the gradual release of responsibility model, offering suggestions for demonstrations and shared or guided writing. Reflection is emphasized as a necessary component to understanding why mentor authors chose certain strategies, literary devices, sentence structures, and words. Lynne and Rose offer new children's book titles in each chapter and in a carefully curated and annotated Treasure Chest. At the end of each chapter a "Think About It--Talk About It--Write About It" section invites reflection and conversation with colleagues. The book is organized around the characteristics of good writing--focus, content, organization, style, and conventions. Rose and Lynne write in a friendly and conversational style, employing numerous anecdotes to help teachers visualize the process, and offer strategies that can be immediately implemented in the classroom. This practical resource demonstrates the power of learning to read like writers.







Once Upon a Fact


Book Description

This timely book explores the debate about how best to engage children in the writing of nonfiction and suggests many instructional strategies for K–6 classrooms. Using transcripts and descriptions of children’s actual writing practices, the authors show that children willingly embrace nonfiction writing when the genre is given an important place in the classroom. Drawn from the authors’ classroom-based research study with third graders, this groundbreaking volume: Explores in detail the intertextual patterns that children adopt when writing nonfiction reports. Documents the ways in which peer and teacher influence fuel and direct children’s writing. Identifies four types of nonfiction writers—strategic, experience-only, memory-only, and textbound–—and presents case studies with excerpts from interviews and nonfiction reports. Offers a set of instructional guidelines for supporting and extending expository writing, including sample lessons and curricular activities.




Teaching Language and Literacy in the Early Years


Book Description

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.




Genre in a Changing World


Book Description

Genre studies and genre approaches to literacy instruction continue to develop in many regions and from a widening variety of approaches. Genre has provided a key to understanding the varying literacy cultures of regions, disciplines, professions, and educational settings. GENRE IN A CHANGING WORLD provides a wide-ranging sampler of the remarkable variety of current work. The twenty-four chapters in this volume, reflecting the work of scholars in Europe, Australasia, and North and South America, were selected from the over 400 presentations at SIGET IV (the Fourth International Symposium on Genre Studies) held on the campus of UNISUL in Tubarão, Santa Catarina, Brazil in August 2007—the largest gathering on genre to that date. The chapters also represent a wide variety of approaches, including rhetoric, Systemic Functional Linguistics, media and critical cultural studies, sociology, phenomenology, enunciation theory, the Geneva school of educational sequences, cognitive psychology, relevance theory, sociocultural psychology, activity theory, Gestalt psychology, and schema theory. Sections are devoted to theoretical issues, studies of genres in the professions, studies of genre and media, teaching and learning genre, and writing across the curriculum. The broad selection of material in this volume displays the full range of contemporary genre studies and sets the ground for a next generation of work.




Writing in Knowledge Societies


Book Description

The editors of WRITING IN KNOWLEDGE SOCIETIES provide a thoughtful, carefully constructed collection that addresses the vital roles rhetoric and writing play as knowledge-making practices in diverse knowledge-intensive settings. The essays in this book examine the multiple, subtle, yet consequential ways in which writing is epistemic, articulating the central role of writing in creating, shaping, sharing, and contesting knowledge in a range of human activities in workplaces, civic settings, and higher education.




Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing


Book Description

Explores the historical context of cognitive studies, the importance to our field of studies in neuroscience, the applicability of habits of mind, and the role of cognition in literate development and transfer.




Teacher Inquiries in Literacy Teaching-Learning


Book Description

A collection of urban elementary teacher researchers' year-long inquiries around literacy topics show how they attempted to transform their teaching practices to meet the needs of students from diverse ethnic & linguistic backgrounds.




Writing Thief


Book Description

Culham demonstrates a major part of good writing instruction is finding the right mentor texts to share with students. Within this book, you'll discover more than 90 excellent mentor texts, along with straight-forward activities that incorporate the traits of writing across informational, narrative, and argument modes.




Vygotskian Perspectives on Literacy Research


Book Description

Contains essays that analyze learning and development based on Lev Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory of human development, describing how schooling is influenced by culture, and using Vygotsky's theory to find solutions to education problems.