In this study, we trace the development of ideas explored during reading lessons in children's writings from one transitional bilingual fourth-grade classroom. Using transcripts from audio- and videotaped lessons, we describe the ways in which the reading lessons, designed to facilitate discussions to enhance student reading comprehension, turned into an anchoring activity for the negotiation of joint meaning. They served as a springboard for joint exploration and the generation of intersubjective and co-constructed ideas that bridged the worlds of home and school. We trace the development of these ideas in representative pieces from five student portfolios. Discussions served to display a number of important literacy processes, and ideas and interpretations from these discussions reappeared in the students' writings. This study is of particular interest to educators concerned both with understanding better the influence of classroom discourse on student writing and with finding ways to incorporate students' cultural backgrounds into classroom practices.

This article takes the position that teaching writing effectively to diverse students of non-English background will require an examination of existing views about the nature of writing and a critical evaluation of the profession's ability to work with bilingual individuals of different types. In order to explain this view, the article is divided into three parts. Part 1 describes the nature of bilingualism, identifies the population of students who can be classified as American bilingual minorities, and suggests that existing compartmentalization within the composition profession cannot address the needs of this particular population. Part 2 of the article reviews trends in current scholarship in second-language writing and points out that most of this research has focused on ESL students rather than on fluent/functional bilinguals. Finally, Part 3 lists and discusses a number of research directions in which the involvement and participation of mainstream scholars would be most valuable. In presenting an outline of questions and issues fundamental to developing effective pedagogical approaches for teaching writing to bilingual minority students, this final section argues that involvement in research on non-English-background populations of researchers who generally concentrate on mainstream issues would do much to break down the compartmentalization now existing within the English composition profession. It further argues that by using bilingual individuals to study questions of major theoretical interest, the profession will strengthen the explanatory power of existing theories about the process and practice of writing in general.

Theoretical and pedagogical interest in writing in academic disciplines and other discourse communities has grown in the last decade, but few studies have looked at advanced levels of disciplinary enculturation. In this study, I examine the contexts for writing and response in a graduate education seminar with fifteen students, including eight nonnative speakers of English. I consider how the professor explicitly and implicitly communicated expectations for the form and content of writing assignments; how the students understood, negotiated and undertook these tasks; and how the professor evaluated and responded to students' final written texts. Finally, I argue that the students' writing tasks occur in a complex, multidimensional historical field of personal and social contexts and that advanced levels of disciplinary enculturation are marked by a specific set of issues revolving around students' emerging authority and conflicts inherent in disciplinary microsocieties.

This article describes episodes of concurrent metalinguistic and ideational thinking in the verbal reports of 23 adult ESL learners composing on two tasks, then relates these descriptions to claims about the value of composition writing for second language learning. Three kinds of thinking episodes, appearing in about 30% of the decisions reported by learners while composing, show potential value for incidental learning of the second language: (a) searching out and assessing appropriate wording, (b) comparing cross-linguistic equivalents, and, much less frequently, (c) reasoning about linguistic choices in the second language. Multivariate analyses indicated that the frequency of these thinking episodes is significantly related to learners' writing expertise in their mother tongue. Implications are drawn for refining Swain's 1985 notion of “comprehensible output” in view of other theories of cognitive learning and second language acquisition, a necessary preliminary to empirical assessment of this hypothesis.

Holistic reading is widely used to assess the proficiency of non-native-speaking (NNS) writers. However, ESL professionals, who have been profoundly influenced by the notion that attention to the NNS author's message is an integral part of teaching the writing process, have questioned how well native-speaking (NS) raters comprehend NNS texts, given that the task of decoding NNS prose is even further complicated by the time constraints of the holistic scoring process itself. This article describes a study that investigated the extent to which NS holistic raters comprehend NNS texts. After rating several practice compositions, subjects rated one of two qualitatively distinct essays, and then wrote recall protocols to test their comprehension. Data analysis revealed that readers of the better written text recalled significantly more than did readers of the less well written text, indicating that NS holistic raters attend to meaning when evaluating NNS writing proficiency.

In their freshman year in college, Puerto Rican students take composition courses in both Spanish and English. Although the rhetorical structure of the final product, the composition, may respond to national writing styles in the two languages, studies show the composition process to be similar. Writing instructors in either language find similar problems in student compositions, regardless of the language code used. One of the difficulties students have in both languages is blocking, or apprehension about writing. Although some aspects of the composition process may be universal, we assumed that in bilingual writers the source of writing block depended on the language used. This article presents the results of a questionnaire designed to determine the sources of bilingual students' apprehension in writing by considering three groups of bilingual writers: graduate students in English, freshman English composition students, and freshman Spanish composition students. The results suggest some insights on the nature of blocking in a native language (Spanish) and a second language (English), which may then lead to ways of helping bilingual students to overcome blocking.

Readers and evaluators of children's writing still fall back on deficit explanations; papers are read for signs of what they lack rather than signs of growth. Presented here is a model that predicts how such growth may occur as a logical outcome of language acquisition. Drawing on research done in the past, the article provides a list of the kinds of language learning underway in the elementary school years and suggests that teachers may use this list to anticipate where and how such learning will influence the writing processes of children. Included in the list are sentence syntax, spelling conventions, and discourse grammars, all of which seem to be learned by “creative construction” (hypothesis building and refinement) and, to some extent, memorization. The article argues that children's writing performance is likely to suffer on one or more writing dimensions as the writer selectively attends to other dimensions of the task. For evaluators and teachers there are implications for feedback, for individual agendas, for revision, and for the kinds of conclusions one may draw from the examination of written products.