Date of Award
6-1-1987
Document Type
Practicum
Degree Name
Master of Science
Department
Center for the Advancement of Education
Advisor
Dr. Joan Horn
Keywords
capitalization, education, hispanic students, middle school, motivation in writing, multicultural learning styles, parent surveys, patterned writing, punctuation, quality writing guidelines, reluctant writers, sentence structure, seventh grade students, student surveys, visual learning, vocabulary development, writing activities, writing attitudes, writing fluency, writing skills, Yaqui students
Abstract
The intent of this practicum was to increase writing fluency and improve writing attitudes exhibited by a group of seventh grade students with Yaqui and Hispanic backgrounds. During a period of 16 weeks, a writing unit was implemented consisting of twenty structured activities to guide students in presenting their ideas and to increase their chances for success. As students' fluency increased, the patterns and models given became less structured so that students used more of their own ideas.
Evaluation was conducted through the use of Quality Writing Guidelines as well as student and parent follow-up surveys. Results indicated increased levels of writing fluency, improved capitalization and punctuation, improved sentence structure, and a wider variety of vocabulary. The methodology was found to be extremely effective in improving writing skills of students having difficulty supplement to regular education language arts teachers.