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If proper placement is a matter of guiding students into the course that is best suited to their educational background and current writing ability, directed self-placement may be the most valid procedure we can use. (Royer and Gilles 69-70).

Introduction PART I: PUBLISHING AS SOCIAL ACTION What is Publishing? The Continuum of Publishers Evaluation and the Role of Visible Text PART II: The Technologies of Publishing Publishing Before Computers The Computerization of Publishing From the Page to the Screen PART III: Publishing, Technology, and the Classroom Technology and Pedagogy Publishing in the Classroom: From Letterpress to the Web and Beyond References List of Figures Author Index Subject Index

PART 1 PRELIMINARIES: EARLY PHASES OF THE FIELD 1 Toward an extended definition of contrastive rhetoric 2 Contrastive rhetoric studies in applied linguistics 3 Historical evaluation of contrastive rhetoric: from Kaplan's 1966 study to diversification in languages, genres, and authors PART 2 INTERFACES WITH OTHER DISCIPLINES 4 Contrastive rhetoric and the field of rhetoric and composition 5 Contrastive rhetoric and text linguistics 6 Writing as an activity embedded in a culture 7 Contrastive rhetoric and translation studies 8 Genre-specific studies in contrastive rhetoric PART 3 IMPLICATIONS OF CONTRASTIVE RHETORIC 9 Methods of research in contrastive rhetoric 10 Conclusion: Implications and research directions

This book undertakes a general framework within which to consider the complex nature of the writing task in English, both as a first, and as a second language. The volume explores varieties of writing, different purposes for learning to write extended text, and cross-cultural variation among second-language writers.The volume overviews textlinguistic research, explores process approaches to writing, discusses writing for professional purposes, and contrastive rhetoric. It proposes a model for text construction as well as a framework for a more general theory of writing. Later chapters, organised around seventy-five themes for writing instruction are devoted to the teaching of writing at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels. Writing assessment and other means for responding to writing are also discussed.William Grabe and Robert Kaplan summarise various theoretical strands that have been recently explored by applied linguists and other writing researchers, and draw these strands together into a coherent overview of the nature of written text. Finally they suggest methods for the teaching of writing consistent with the nature, processes and social context of writing.

Discovery of Competence shows how the writing classroom can be reconceived as an environment for collaborative inquiry by students and teachers. It presents new ways of thinking about program design, redefines the nature of writing assessment, and offers alternative conceptions of multicultural curriculums. Drawing on students' writing and research, it suggests how teachers can recognize their students' competence and help them build on it systematically. While the book speaks to all teachers of writing, it will be of considerable interest to those who work with diverse student populations, including ESL students. The authors make it clear that the writing classroom is a place where both students and their teachers may build on their competence and realize their possibilities as writers and learners.

Reading and Teaching Popular Media Making Sense of the Media - From Reading to Culture A Boy's Own Story - Writing Masculine Genres Hardcore Rappin' - Popular Music, Identity and Critical Discourse The me in the Picture is not me - Photography as Writing Reading Audiences - The Subjective and the Social Intervening in Culture - Media Studies, English and the Response to Mass Culture In Other Words - Evaluation, Writing and Reflection Going Critical - The Development of Critical Discourse Solving the Theoretical Problem - Positive Images and Practical work Conclusion - Dialogues with the Future.

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Assesment reform is an important topic in today's education. This document guides decisons about assessing the teaching and learning of reading and writing and reflects advances in understanding the best classroom practices.

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This book, the first to focus exclusively on portfolio assessment, is practical, theoretical, and broad in scope, offering places to start rather than claiming to be definitive. The articles, all by teachers with considerable experience in using portfolio grading, are free of jargon, making sound composition and assessment theory available to every reader, regardless of the level of writing taught.

This book examines the process of reading (when one's purpose is to create a text of one's own) and writing (which includes a response to the work of others). This is a central process in most college work and at the heart of critical literacy. The study observed students in the transition from high school to college, and in the process of trying to enter the community of academic discourse. The study draws on the methods of textual analysis, teacher evaluation, and interviews to examine students' writing and revising.

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At the Point of Need is a richly detailed account of the experiences of teachers, tutors, and students over a five-year period in a university writing center, whose main mission was to enable basic and ESL writers to handle college writing demands. By and large, it's a success story, with implications and applications far beyond the purview of that particular writing center. Essentially, it wasn't broad knowledge of teaching or writing that these teachers and basic writers needed. What they needed was permission and encouragement to evaluate their own work; a way to evaluate it for themselves while including feedback from others; peers to help them brainstorm things to try when they got stuck; support for trying the unconventional; and freedom from constant impersonal assessment.

This book is a major breakthrough for developers of writing assessment programs who must certify the writing competency of undergraduate students. Legislators and accreditation boards across the nation have called for and implemented large scale projects to measure educational outcomes. This single source provides comprehensive information on the history, underlying concepts, and process of conducting a large scale writing assessment program at a specific institution of higher education. The handbook opens with an analysis of the rationale for the assessment of writing during the junior year of the undergraduate curriculum. The authors then turn to a case study of the success of their own institutional wide assessment program. A history is provided of 20th century writing assessment practices; as well, attention is given to defining levels of literacy. After describing an assessment process model, discussion turns to the design of questions, the administration of the assessment, the rating of papers, and the statistical analysis of data. Attention is also given to the design of a course for those who are unsuccessful on the assessment. The study closes with directions for further research and over 200 references in the bibliography.

The English Coalition Conference: Democracy through Language, Richard Lloyd-Jones and Andrea A. Lunsford S. Michael Halloran and John Hollow Developing Successful College  Writing Programs, Edward M. White Louise Wetherbee Phelps Advanced Placement English.: Theory, Politics, and Pedagogy, Gary A. Olson, Elizabeth Metzger, and Evelyn Ashton-Jones David W. Chapman Creating Writers: Linking Assessment and Writing Instruction, Vicki Spandel and Richard J. Stiggins Karen L. Greenberg A Program Development Handbook for the Holistic Assessment of Writing, Norbert Elliot, Maximino Plata,and Paul Zelhart Edward M. White Programs That Work: Models and Methods for Writing Across the Curriculum, Toby Fulwiler and Art Young Disciplinary Perspectives on Thinking and Writing, Barbara S. Morris Joseph F. Trimmer Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, Bruce Lincoln Joseph Harris

I recently attended a conference previously unknown to me and to most college English faculty: The Assessment Forum of American Association for Higher Education (AAHE). (I was there to give a paper on measurement of writing ability and on evaluation of writing programs.) The experience of that conference ought to have been routine; after all, I have directed a variety of large-scale writing programs and I have been speaking and publishing on writing assessment for over fifteen years; I have also spent many years as chair of an English department and as a writing program administrator. But experience of hearing papers and discussions at that conference was not at all routine; it was both troubling and enlightening, as well as quite new in unexpected ways. My first reaction to sessions on writing measurement at AAHE was that I had entered a new world. The papers not only made different assumptions about writing than I, as a writing teacher, writer, and researcher, normally make, but came out of a wholly different scholarly community of discourse, one that calls itself the assessment movement. The references were entirely unfamiliar, procedures were different, and approach to subject struck me as insensitive to what writing is all about. But all of these differences seemed to center on way people spoke (and hence thought) about measurement: I was in a foreign country, language was different, and that difference changed everything. I had entered a new discourse community in a field in which I was a well-published specialist, and none of my knowledge or experience seemed to matter. And yet discourse was about measuring writing ability and evaluating writing programs, that is, about what has (however accidentally) become my specialty. I felt disoriented. When I returned home from AAHE I found a flier from Jossey-Bass, publisher of my 1985 book, Teaching and Assessing Writing. I don't expect book to appear on every flier marketing division puts out, but this little

cable of the direct writing assessment instruments (Baurer; Spandel and Stiggins; Scherer; Veal and Hudson). White notes that holistic scoring (not Diederich's general impression scoring used in early direct evaluation research) has quickly become standard practice in a profession that is slow to make significant changes (19). One reason holistic scoring has gained acceptance so quickly may be that it so well fits this era in English studies. By employing a rater's full impression

Intended for writing instructors at all levels who lack the training to deal effectively with the increasingly important role played by empirical research in their field, Composition Research explains ten of the most common empirical designs used in the social sciences. These include: case study, ethnography, sampling/survey, quantitative descriptive research, prediction and classification studies, true and quasi-experiments, meta-analysis, and program evaluation. Each design is explained with reference to at least two specific composition studies, and includes a separate bibliography that identifies further writing studies that use it. The book also features a chapter on measurement, an appendix on statistical analyses, a glossary of technical terms and symbols, and guidelines for research on human subjects.

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To establish the issues that must be considered by evaluators of college writing programs, Witte and Faigley review major evaluation studies conducted at the University of Northern Iowa, the University of California San Diego, Miami University, and the University of Texas.For each study the authors devise a series of questions that probe every aspect of theory, pedagogy, and research: What do we presently know? What assumptions are we making and how do those assumptions limit our knowledge? Are those limitations necessary or desirable? What do we still need to know?Such questions demand much of program evaluators, who also must face additional difficult questions as they evaluate a writing program. Do the instructors conducting the writing classes share common assumptions that are reflected in their assignments, evaluative procedures, teaching procedures, and course content? How stable will the program prove to be over time? Will the writing program have a lasting effect? Do students leave the program with increased confidence in their ability to write?As Witte and Faigley urge program evaluators to pose these questions, they also bring to the problem a new comprehensive conceptual framework that both necessitates such queries and provides an opportunity to answer them.

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Edward B. Versluis, Response to Bruce T. Petersen, et alia, "Computer-Assisted Instruction and the Writing Process: Questions for Research and Evaluation,", College Composition and Communication, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Oct., 1985), pp. 346-347

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Bruce T. Petersen, Cynthia L. Selfe, Billie J. Wahlstrom, Computer-Assisted Instruction and the Writing Process: Questions for Research and Evaluation, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Feb., 1984), pp. 98-101

Nineteen years ago, Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer compared research in written composition to chemical research as it emerged from period of alchemy,1 an image that continues to haunt us, leading us to expect research in composition to evolve as a discipline, like each of sciences, with universally accepted methods and neat boundaries around its subject. Since that time a great deal of important research has occurred, much of it supported by methods and insights imported from social and behavioral sciences. But evolution suggested by image has not occurred. In particular, we certainly know more about evaluation than we did twenty years ago; but what we know is not definitive, nor is it an orderly and systematic corpus. It may be described as a growing list of terms and techniques, such as the general impression scales a system used by ETS;2 and analytic scales, guided scoring procedure developed by Paul Diederich;3 and Primary Trait Scoring, system developed by Richard Lloyd-Jones for National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP);4 and T-unit analysis, measure of syntactic fluency invented by Kellogg Hunt;5 and holistic scoring, a generic term that, as Charles Cooper defines it, includes a variety of guided scoring methods;6 and relative readability, focus of measurement proposed by E. D. Hirsch in The Philosophy of Composition.7 What is remarkable about this list is that it would make as much sense to study it in alphabetical order as chronological. Each of items is so thoroughly independent of others that not even order of their invention is logical or necessary. To items I have mentioned might be added others so disparate in what they purport to measure as to suggest that we have not even agreed on what it is we are trying to evaluate--whether it is mastery of editorial skills, or indices of cognitive development, or success in communicating a semantic intention. In evaluation of writing, old systems survive invention of new ones; nothing supersedes or replaces anything else. There are a few gains in precision, but always at expense of

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Ruth will labor over the first paragraph of an essay for hours. She'll write a sentence, then erase it. Try another, then scratch part of it out. Finally, as the evening winds on toward ten o'clock and Ruth, anxious about tomorrow's deadline, begins to wind into herself, she'll compose that first paragraph only to sit back and level her favorite exasperated interdiction at herself and her page: No. You can't say that. You'll bore them to death. Ruth is one of ten UCLA undergraduates with whom I discussed writer's block, that frustrating, self-defeating inability to generate the next line, the right phrase, the sentence that will release the flow of words once again. These ten people represented a fair cross-section of the UCLA student community: lower-middle-class to upper-middle-class backgrounds and high schools, third-world and Caucasian origins, biology to fine arts majors, C+ to Agrade point averages, enthusiastic to blase attitudes toward school. They were set off from the community by the twin facts that all ten could write competently, and all were currently enrolled in at least one course that required a significant amount of writing. They were set off among themselves by the fact that five of them wrote with relative to enviable ease while the other five experienced moderate to nearly immobilizing writer's block. This blocking usually resulted in rushed, often late papers and resultant grades that did not truly reflect these students' writing ability. And then, of course, there were other less measurable but probably more serious results: a growing distrust of their abilities and an aversion toward the composing process itself. What separated the five students who blocked from those who didn't? It wasn't skill; that was held fairly constant. The answer could have rested in the emotional realm-anxiety, fear of evaluation, insecurity, etc. Or perhaps blocking in some way resulted from variation in cognitive style. Perhaps, too, blocking originated in and typified a melding of emotion and cognition not unlike the relationship posited by Shapiro between neurotic feeling and

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