Cooperative Instructional Application of Writing Research. Final Report. Volume Two.

The second of three volumes on the relationship between writing research and instruction, this report first describes a 1982 conference on writing policies and problems sponsored by the Educational Research and Development division of the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) and the California State University, Long Beach. The second section reports on a series of staff development workshops in written composition which reviewed the results of a student writing skill survey, presented a general view of the composing process and of writing instruction, and discussed specific writing problems among students in grades 2 and 3 and grades 5 and 6. The third section contains three issues of SWRL's "Instructional Improvement Digest" on teaching students to revise, teaching sentence structure and versatility, and increasing student writing quality and quantity without increasing the teacher's paper load. The final section contains four reports on the following spelling-related topics: regularity and irregularity in spelling and spelling instruction, the occurrence of selected features in elementary school spelling texts, the relative frequency of homophones in children's writing, and the use of the Proficiency Verification System (PVS) to assess students' regular spelling development. This last report includes copies of the prototype materials. (MM)