Negotiating membership within a disciplinary community is as much an exercise in rhetorical facility as it is content expertise. Where individuals reside in the hierarchy of membership is determined by not only what they talk and write about, but how. Yet, there are many factors that can impact newcomers’ acculturation into a disciplinary community on a rhetorical level. In this article, I use positioning theory and intersectional identity to examine how Anne, a woman of color participating in undergraduate research in science, learned to read and write as a scientist and the ways her social position as a woman, person of color, and low-income and first-generation student influenced her perception and adoption of the discourse as her own. I argue that social positioning influences students’ views of scientific discourse and affects their rhetorical skill development as scientific writers. Because recognition as a group insider is heavily influenced by discourse, this research has potential implications for those interested in retention and persistence of women of color in STEM, as well as for those interested in changing learning cultures and incorporating writing instruction into disciplinary arenas.

Research suggests that student development as writers requires a supportive environment in which they receive sustained opportunities to write. However, writing researchers in general know relatively little about the actual writing opportunities embedded in students’ language arts lessons and how students’ production of texts in class is framed. The present study analyzes 178 video-recorded language arts lessons across 46 secondary classrooms in Norway based on the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observation. Specifically, we assess how often and in what situations students get an opportunity to engage in writing or are explicitly encouraged to write. We found that some writing assignments are short and fragmented, especially when students are merely recopying information from teachers’ materials. However, our analysis also provides detailed insight into how some teachers facilitate sustained, genre-focused, and process-oriented writing opportunities. These are powerful examples of successful writing instruction, and they suggest that when Norwegian language arts teachers prioritize writing, the opportunities to write are both sustained and scaffolded, the purpose of writing is explicit, and genre-specific assessment criteria are often used.

This report details the second phase of an ongoing research project investigating the visual invention and composition processes of scientific researchers. In this phase, four academic researchers completed think-aloud protocols as they composed graphics for research presentations; they also answered follow-up questions about their visual education, pedagogy, genres of practice, and interactions with publics. Results are presented first as narratives and then as topologies—visualizations of the communal beliefs, values, and norms ( topoi) that connect the individual narratives to wider community practices. Results point toward an ecological model of visual invention and composition strategies in the crafting of research graphics. They also suggest that these strategies may be underrepresented in scientists’ education. More explicit attention to them may help improve STEM visual literacy for nonexperts.

This study examines the composing process and authorial agency of a college ESL writer as she remediated an argumentative essay into a multimodal digital video. Employing principles of sociosemiotic ethnography, and drawing on the concepts of resemiotization and recontextualization, the study investigated multiple types of data, including an argumentative paper, video transcript, multimedia video, interview transcripts, and observation notes. Data analysis shows that her choice and orchestration of modal resources were shaped by her textual identity construction work, efforts to accommodate perceived audiences, and previous experience with the medium. Remediation with multimedia offered the student more semiotic resources to expand authorship, but the contextual forces of audience and medium bounded her authorial expression. The student’s multimodal writing illustrated discursive processes of negotiating and performing authorial positions for rhetorical goals with awareness of the linguistic, social, and cultural contexts of text production. This investigation ultimately aims to expand aspects of multimodal writing and literacy practice by examining the discursive nature of the design process in linguistically and culturally diverse contexts.

Drawing on fieldwork, this article examines nursing students’ design and use of a patient health record during clinical simulations, where small teams of students provide nursing care for a robotic patient. The student-designed patient health record provides a compelling example of how simulation genres can both authentically coordinate action within a classroom simulation and support professional genre uptake. First, the range of rhetorical choices available to students in designing their simulation health records are discussed. Then, the article draws on an extended example of how student uptake of the patient health record within a clinical simulation emphasized its intertextual relationship to other genres, its role mediating social interactions with the patient and other providers, and its coordination of embodied actions. Connections to students’ experiences with professional genres are addressed throughout. The article concludes by considering initial implications of this research for disciplinary and professional writing courses.

This qualitative study traces different articulations of the public, emotional honesty, and economic advantage in the literacy sponsorship of detained writer Lil’ Purp by The Beat Within, a publication for incarcerated youth and adults. Findings are compared to The Beat’s own account of Purp’s progress, revealing a set of practices reminiscent of Socratic parrhêsia that revise understanding of literacy sponsorship by expanding it to a philosophical register. Because The Beat also becomes a site of affective solidarity among detained writers in a way that resists the directional logic of writing toward civic participation, the study supports thinking about affect in public writing not as a process that moves toward political action, but rather as action in the immediate space of its utterance and reception. Such findings have implications both for public writing pedagogy and for community-based literacy scholarship.

Some literacy scholars have embraced rooted cosmopolitanism as a framework for educating in today’s globalized and pluralistic world, where communicating across difference is an important individual and societal good. But how is the “cosmopolitan turn” in writing complicated by considering the religiosity of writing teachers and student writers? Is it possible for writing instructors and student writers to stay rooted in their own faith traditions, while maintaining openness to other ethical vantage points? What new questions are raised for cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogy by these considerations? Through portraiture, we present complex pictures of how an American evangelical Christian teacher, Sam, and one of his evangelical Christian students, Charlie, engaged with a writing unit focused on “This I Believe” essay writing. The portraitures suggest that Sam, a more cosmopolitan evangelical, envisioned the unit as an invitation to (a) articulate one’s own beliefs in the wide universe of moral possibility and (b) get used to the beliefs of others who are ethically different from oneself. Charlie, on the other hand, conceptualized the unit’s writing, listening, and reading tasks as ways of honoring God and letting God speak through his literate practices. Our interpretation suggests that his populist evangelical faith made it difficult for him to openly engage in cosmopolitan dialogue across ethical difference. We hope our portraits of Sam and Charlie might move scholars interested in writing, literacy education, and rooted cosmopolitanism to engage themselves with the challenges and possibilities opened up when students’ and teachers’ religious roots are taken seriously.

There is increasing usage of creative writing in the ESL/EFL classroom based on the argument that this pedagogy develops writer’s voice, emotional engagement, and ownership. Within the context of teaching poetry writing to second language learners, the current article develops a scientific approach to ways in which voice can be measured and then empirically explores the claim that voice is present within poetry written by second language learners. The study explored this question: Do second language poetry writers have a discernable voice in their written poetry? This issue was investigated in two different ways: (a) utilizing human reader ratings of the likelihood that two poems were written by the same poet and (b) using computational linguistic methodology to explore systematic differences in specific linguistic features in poetry written by second language poets. The data presented here show that poetry written by the same L2 writer is more readily recognized as such and that relevant linguistic items have patterns of frequency of usage that are different for different poets. Together the two studies provide a compelling case that voice is measureable and present in the poetry written by second language learners.

Theorists of multiliteracies, social semiotics, and the New Literacy Studies have drawn attention to the potential changing nature of writing and literacy in the context of networked communications. This article reports findings from a design-based research project in Year 4 classrooms (students aged 8.5-10 years) in a low socioeconomic status school. A new writing program taught students how to design multimodal and digital texts across a range of genres and text types, such as web pages, online comics, video documentaries, and blogs. The authors use Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device to theorize the pedagogic struggles and resolutions in remaking English through the specialization of time, space, and text. The changes created an ideological struggle as new writing practices were adapted from broader societal fields to meet the instructional and regulative discourses of a conventional writing curriculum.

Developmental composition courses serve a sizable and growing number of Generation 1.5 students, or long-term U.S. resident language learners, and it is believed that language challenges may be part of Generation 1.5 writers’ difficulty in controlling the academic register. The current study investigates possible similarities and differences between Generation 1.5 students ( n = 149) and two other student groups: mainstream first language (L1) writers ( n = 203) and more traditional second language (L2) writers ( n = 55), thus determining the extent to which language-use variables distinguish Generation 1.5 texts from those of their classmates. Results indicate significant differences between Generation 1.5 and L2 students on holistic writing quality, word errors, word class errors, verb errors, total identified errors, and spoken features of language. Generation 1.5 and L1 texts significantly differed on academic features of language. Implications are presented, suggesting that developmental Generation 1.5 writing may be more similar to L1 writing than has been previously reported.

Using Ivanic’s (2004) framework, the study of 20 elementary teachers examines the relationships among teachers’ beliefs about writing, their instructional practices, and contextual factors. While the district-adopted curriculum reflected specific discourses, teachers’ beliefs and practices reflected a combination of discourses. The nature of the professional development tended to reinforce particular discourses, but occasionally offered an alternative. The three cases revealed how teachers negotiated the tensions among various discourses. Beth exemplified a skills discourse, but demonstrated beliefs about writing as communication; however, she did not articulate tensions between the discourses and followed the district, skillsinfused curriculum. Amber borrowed from skills, traits, process, and genre discourses without resolving potential contradictions, resulting in instructional practices that had little coherence. Jackson, who brought in his own writing as a hip-hop artist, illustrated the social practices discourse as well as creativity and genre discourses to create an enhanced version of a district-adopted curriculum. Implications for practice include raising teacher’s awareness of the contradictory discourses that surround them.

This analysis of 83 scoring rubrics and grade definitions from writing programs at U.S. public research universities captures the current state of the struggle to define and measure specific writing traits, and it enables an induction of the underlying theoretical construct of “academic writing” present at these writing programs. Findings suggest that writing specialists have managed to permeate U.S. first-year writing assessment with certain progressive assumptions about writing and writing instruction, but they also indicate critical areas for revision, given such documents’ critical gatekeeping role at postsecondary institutions. The study also raises a broader question about the difficulties of rhetorically constructing “writing ability” in a way that is consistent with the contextualist paradigm dominant in contemporary writing studies.

Writers typically produce their writing in bursts. In this article, the authors examine written language bursts in a sample of 33 children aged 11 years with specific language impairment. Comparisons of the children with specific language impairment with an age-matched group of typically developing children ( n = 33) and a group of younger, language skill–matched children ( n = 33) revealed the role of writing bursts as a key factor in differentiating writing competence. All the children produced the same number of writing bursts in a timed writing task. Children with specific language impairment produced a shorter number of words in each burst than did the age-matched group but the same as the language skill–matched group. For all groups, spelling accuracy and handwriting speed were significant predictors of burst length and text quality. The frequency of pauses at misspellings was related to shorter bursts. These results offer support to Hayes’s model of text generation; namely, burst length is constrained by language and transcription skills.

Writing performance of a complex recommendation report produced by student teams for an actual client during a 15-week semester was compared in a writing-intensive Agronomy 356 course and in paired Agronomy 356/ English 309 courses. The longitudinal study investigated differences that existed between reports produced for each learning environment in terms of argument effectiveness, document usability, and professionalism. Three agronomy and three professional communication raters ranked the 12 lengthy reports in the sample. The study found that all top-rated reports were generated in the paired courses and all lowest-rated reports were generated in the stand-alone agronomy course. Four pedagogical factors appear influential in this result: working in dual problem-solving spaces, pushing the boundaries on problem solving, incorporating workplace realities, and using just-in-time teaching.

This article reports the results of an interview-based study which investigated the citation behavior in the assignment writing of two second-language postgraduate business management students, Sofie and Tara. Discourse-based interviews were used to elicit the students’ own perspectives on their citation behavior in two of their assignments. Citations were one of the ways in which Sofie and Tara enacted performance (Goffman, 1959), aiming to create a favorable impression on the assignment markers. Both students made sure they cited key sources on their reading lists, whether they found the texts helpful or not, because they understood that lecturers required evidence that these sources had been consulted. Both writers also cited a large number of sources, whether they had read these sources carefully or not, to perform the industrious student who reads widely. By ensuring the same sources which had been discussed in class were cited in her writing, Tara was able to perform the attentive student who listened carefully to lectures and seminars. Sofie sometimes tailored what she cited to fit her markers’ perceived interests and ideological standpoints, in an attempt to align her own stance with what she felt would be the stance of her markers and thus gain their favor. Implications of using Goffman’s notion of performance to explore student writers’ citing behavior are discussed. The pedagogical implications of the study for subject-specific lecturers and for EAP teachers are also addressed.

This article reports on an international study of the teaching of undergraduate mathematics in seven countries. Informed by rhetorical genre theory, activity theory, and the notion of Communities of Practice, this study explores a pedagogical genre at play in university mathematics lecture classrooms. The genre is mediational in that it is a tool employed in the activity of teaching. The data consist of audio/video-recorded lectures, observational notes, semistructured interviews, and written artifacts collected from 50 participants who differed in linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds; teaching experience; and languages of instruction. The study suggests that chalk talk, namely, writing out a mathematical narrative on the board while talking aloud, is the central pedagogical genre of the undergraduate mathematics lecture classroom. Pervasive pedagogical genres, like chalk talk, which develop within global disciplinary communities of practice, appear to override local differences across contexts of instruction. Better understanding these genres may lead to new insights regarding academic literacies and teaching.

While longitudinal research within the field of writing studies has contributed to our understanding of postsecondary students’ writing development, there has been less attention given to the discursive resources students bring with them into writing classrooms and how they make use of these resources in first-year composition courses. This article reports findings from a cross-institutional research study that examines how students access and make use of prior genre knowledge when they encounter new writing tasks in first-year composition courses. Findings reveal a range of ways student make use of prior genre knowledge, with some students breaking down their genre knowledge into useful strategies and repurposing it, and with others maintaining known genres regardless of task.

This study explores how different kinds of arguments are situated in academic contexts and provides an analysis of undergraduate writing assignments. Assignments were collected from the schools of business, education, engineering, fine arts, and interdisciplinary studies as well as the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences in the College of Arts and Science. A total of 265 undergraduate writing assignments from 71 courses were analyzed. Assignments were reliably categorized into these major categories of argumentative writing: explicitly thesis-driven assignments, text analysis, empirical arguments, decision-based arguments, proposals, short answer arguments, and compound arguments. A majority of writing assignments (59%) required argumentation. All engineering writing assignments required argumentation, as did 90% in fine arts, 80% of interdisciplinary assignments, 72% of social science assignments, 60% of education assignments, 53% in natural science, 47% in the humanities, and 46% in business. Argumentation is valued across the curriculum, yet different academic contexts require different forms of argumentation.

In an increasingly globalized world, writing courses, situated as they are in local institutional and rhetorical contexts, need to prepare writers for global writing situations. Taking introductory technical communication in the United States as a case study, this article describes how and to what extent global perspectives are incorporated into writing. Based on an analysis of eight textbooks and a closer analysis of four of them, we illustrate the representation of technical communication and communicators as well as multiculturalism and multilingualism in these textbooks and point out the limitations vis-à-vis the cultural and linguistic complexity of global technical communication in today’s world. We conclude by considering implications for U.S. college composition as it continues to contribute to the international discourse of writing studies.

Studies of university writing assignments demonstrate inconsistencies in the elements examined, making it difficult to achieve a clear understanding of the range, frequency, and characteristics of assignments that students might encounter. In this research study, syllabi from one university college were analyzed to determine the types and frequency of assignments and how these assignments vary by program and level. A total of 179 syllabi from all courses taught during 1 academic year were collected. On average, 2.5 writing assignments per course were assigned. Almost half of all assignments were 4 pages or less in length. Though length and grade value of assignments were significantly correlated, students did not write significantly longer or more high-stakes assignments as they progressed. The most common type of assignment was the term or research paper, though task labels were highly variable. Program profiles revealed differences between programs in frequency of assignments, learning goals, nested assignments, and in-process feedback. Implications for Writing Across the Curriculum programming and the development of departmental writing profiles are discussed.

An extensive body of scholarship has documented the way disciplinary texts and activities are produced and mediated through their relationship to a wide array of extradisciplinary discourses. This article seeks to complement and extend that line of work by drawing upon Witte’s (1992) notion of intertext to address the way disciplinary activities repurpose, or reuse and transform, extradisciplinary practices. Based on text collection and practice-oriented retrospective accounts of one writer’s processes for a number of textual activities, the article argues that the writer’s developing disciplinary writing process as a graduate student in English literature is mediated by practices she repurposed from previous engagements with keeping a prayer journal as a member of a church youth group and generating visual designs for an undergraduate graphic arts class. Ultimately, the article argues for increased theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical attention to the discursive practices persons recruit and reinvigorate across multiple engagements with reading, writing, making, and doing.

The authors' goal was to model the role played by the relationship between a writing teacher and her students in the feedback and revision cycle they experienced in an English-as-a-foreign-language context. Participants included a nonnative teacher of English and 14 students enrolled in her English writing class in a Korean university. Data came from formal, informal, and text-based interviews; semester-long classroom observations; and students' drafts with teacher comments. Findings showed that caring was enacted in complex and reciprocal ways, influenced by interwoven factors from the greater society, the course, the teacher, and the student. Students' level of trust in the teacher's English ability, teaching practices, and written feedback, as much as the teacher's trust in particular students based on how they revised their drafts, played a great role in the development of a caring relationship between them.

The study uses Foucault's framework of governmentality to understand the impact of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) on teachers' writing instruction and attitudes toward writing in high- and low-income schools. Using interviews and observations of 18 teachers, the study identified four themes: emphasis on testing, curricular effects, awareness of lower-achieving students, and concerns for English language learners. While teachers shared concerns in those areas, there were differences in how teachers from high- and low-income schools experienced the impact of NCLB on their writing instruction. The study suggests that NCLB has affected teacher morale as well as the nature and amount of writing instruction, but that school contexts figure into teachers' instruction. The example of one teacher from a low-income school demonstrates the potential for teachers to resist the coercive aspects of NCLB through their writing instruction.

Frequently writing is now no longer the central mode of representation in learning materials—textbooks, Web-based resources, teacher-produced materials. Still (as well as moving) images are increasingly prominent as carriers of meaning. Uses and forms of writing have undergone profound changes over the last decades, which calls for a social, pedagogical, and semiotic explanation. Two trends mark that history. The digital media, rather than the (text) book, are more and more the site of appearance and distribution of learning resources, and writing is being displaced by image as the central mode for representation. This poses sharp questions about present and future roles and forms of writing. For text, design and principles of composition move into the foreground. Here we sketch a social semiotic account that aims to elucidate such principles and permits consideration of their epistemological as well as social/pedagogic significance. Linking representation with social factors, we put forward terms to explore two issues: the principles underlying the design of multimodal ensembles and the potential epistemological and pedagogic effects of multimodal designs. Our investigation is set within a research project with a corpus of learning resources for secondary school in Science, Mathematics, and English from the 1930s, the 1980s, and from the first decade of the 21st century, as well as digitally represented and online learning resources from the year 2000 onward.

This study investigates the influence of students' perceptions of task similarity/ difference on the transfer of writing skills. A total of 42 students from a freshman ESL writing course completed an out-of-class writing task. For half of the students, the subject matter of the writing task was designed to be similar to the writing course; for the other half, it was designed to be different. All students were also interviewed about the writing task. Reports of learning transfer were identified in the interview transcripts, and students' performances on the task and on a recent assignment from the course were assessed. Results indicate that the intended task similarity/difference (i.e., in subject matter) did not have the expected impact on learning transfer; however, students' perceptions of task similarity/difference did influence learning transfer. Implications of these findings for theory, practice, and future research are discussed.

To be effective, writers must understand what knowledge they share with the audience and what they do not. Achieving this understanding is made difficult by the knowledge effect—a tendency of individuals to assume that their own knowledge is shared by others. Understanding the knowledge effect and methods for reducing it is potentially useful for understanding and teaching writing. In Study 1, we explored the impact of an individual's knowledge of technical terms on that person's ability to estimate other people's understanding of those terms. We assessed how individuals' familiarity with technical terms influenced their predictions that college freshmen and college graduates would understand those terms. Results indicate that familiarity with the meaning of technical terms leads to substantial overestimation of others' knowledge. In Study 2, we evaluated an online tutor designed to improve writers' predictions of other's word knowledge by providing them with feedback on the accuracy of their judgments.

This study reports about a yearlong study of the initiation of novice grant writers to the activity system of National Institutes of Health grant applications. It investigates the use of cognitive apprenticeship within writing classrooms and that of social apprenticeship in laboratories, programs, departments, and universities, which introduced students to the genre system of National Institutes of Health grant proposals and helped them in moving from peripheral participation to more central participation. While cognitive apprenticeship employs devices such as modeling, scaffolding, coaching, and collaboration to enhance learning in formal settings, social apprenticeship requires socialization, interaction, and collaboration with experts, colleagues, and peers in informal settings to acquire disciplinary knowledge and experiences. The study suggests that writing instructors should acknowledge and incorporate resources in other activity systems in which students participate, i.e., their laboratories and home departments, and teach genre systems rather than specific genres to better facilitate students' enculturation to activity systems of disciplinary discourse communities.

This article presents a rhetorical analysis of a Mexican woman's oral narrative performance using a discourse studies and interactional sociolinguistics framework. The results of the analysis suggest that the discursive practice of the oral narrative and that of academic discourse share certain rhetorical features. These features are (a) the fashioning of an authoritative voice, (b) the presentation of evidence for support of a claim, (c) the allusion to authorities for support of claims, and (d) the reaching of a general statement concerning the significance of the account. Given the parallels drawn out between this particular nonmainstream oral performance and the discourse of the academy, the assumptions concerning the link between form of expression and cognition must be reassessed to better understand the nature of constrative rhetorics, especially as this affects students of nonmainstream linguistic backgrounds in mainstream writing classrooms.

This study charts the terrain of research on writing during the 6-year period from 1999 to 2004, asking “What are current trends and foci in research on writing?” In examining a cross-section of writing research, the authors focus on four issues: (a) What are the general problems being investigated by contemporary writing researchers? Which of the various problems dominate recent writing research, and which are not as prominent? (b) What population age groups are prominent in recent writing research? (c) What is the relationship between population age groups and problems under investigation? and (d) What methodologies are being used in research on writing? Based on a body of refereed journal articles ( n = 1,502) reporting studies about writing and composition instruction that were located using three databases, the authors characterize various lines of inquiry currently undertaken. Social context and writing practices, bi- or multi-lingualism and writing, and writing instruction are the most actively studied problems during this period, whereas writing and technologies, writing assessment and evaluation, and relationships among literacy modalities are the least studied problems. Undergraduate, adult, and other postsecondary populations are the most prominently studied population age group, whereas preschool-aged children and middle and high school students are least studied. Research on instruction within the preschool through 12th grade (P-12) age group is prominent, whereas research on genre, assessment, and bi- or multilingualism is scarce within this population. The majority of articles employ interpretive methods. This indicator of current writing research should be useful to researchers, policymakers, and funding agencies, as well as to writing teachers and teacher educators.

This article examines writing conference discourse in one English as a Second Language (ESL) basic composition course. The study is based on a 25,000-word corpus of 10 writing conference interactions between the instructor and seven students. Through a microlevel analysis, the authors demonstrate how and to what degree the writing conference can serve as a locus of “emergent agency,” with a particular focus on the second-language writer. The data exhibit patterns in the students’ discourse such that earlier segments in the interactions tend to reflect uncertainty, confusion, negative self-evaluation, and negative other-evaluation. As the sessions progress, the authors note shifts in stance whereby students begin to propose candidate solutions to actual or perceived problems and evince more authorial direction. The authors demonstrate that the practice can serve as an effective pedagogical activity in which novice writers learn to navigate through challenges and obstacles associated with university-level reading and writing tasks.

The introduction of seminars to university teaching marks the onset of a new teaching philosophy and practice in which writing is used to make students independent learners and researchers. Although the beginnings of writing pedagogy at American universities are well documented, little is known about its origins in Germany. The article tracks the history of seminar teaching back to its roots and reviews its historical development from the very beginnings to the point when seminars became the pedagogical flagship of the Humboldtian research university. Twenty seminar regulations from Prussian universities, written between 1812 and 1839, are reviewed with respect to the prescriptions they contain about writing. They reveal that a writing-to-learn pedagogy was elaborated as early as about 1820. The most important claim of the article is that an early concept of writing in the disciplines was central to the development of the Humboldtian research university.

Using a method of topical rhetorical analysis, inspired by K. Burke, to discuss the Ebonics debate, this article demonstrates that conversations about education, particularly writing instruction, have adopted a market rhetoric that limits teachers’ agency. However, reappropriation of this market rhetoric can help writing teachers to imagine and actuate a more empowered and long-sighted agency for themselves. Rhetorical analysis can therefore help educators to understand how local language practices shape their interaction with the rapidly changing material environment of fast capitalism.

This is an extended summary of a pedagogic essay by Mikhail M. Bakhtin on writing style, titled “Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar: Stylistics as Part of Russian Language Instruction in Secondary School.” In this essay, written in spring 1945 while Bakhtin was a secondary school teacher of Russian language arts, he argues that every grammatical form is a representation of reality and needs to be taught in relation to stylistic choices; otherwise, grammar instruction is pedantic and leads students to write in a deadening bookish style. Bakhtin describes and analyzes a lesson on the stylistic force of parataxic sentences. He asks students to identify the voice and psychological expression conveyed in examples from Pushkin and Gogol, so they may recover the liveliness in their expression that they had in their younger grades, but at a higher level of cultural development. He finds that after instruction, students use more parataxic sentences, increasing the liveliness of their writing.

Bakhtin claims that students must learn to write lively prose, but they will not until teachers have a grammar of style that links syntax to stylistic qualities such as “lively” and “creative.” It is, however, unlikely that such a grammar could be written, because particular rhetorical effects too often depend on context, perceived intention, and so on. Moreover, such a grammar will not be written until language describing a writer or a writer’s style can be translated into language describing a reader’s response. Even so, some stylistic effects can be linked to some syntactic structures, and parataxis is one of them. Bakhtin’s method of teaching—showing how the same content expressed in different ways can have contrasting rhetorical effects—is sound. Although he focuses on pedagogy, his own language suggests a larger aim: the replacement of bureaucratic language with the language of the people, perhaps even the liberalization of Soviet society.

In “Dialogic Origin,” Mikhail Bakhtin—as teacher-researcher and theorist—presents readers with a remarkable essay on teaching grammar and style to 7th-year students (roughly equivalent to 10thgraders in the U.S. educational system). In doing so, Bakhtin employs some of his most notable concepts (among them dialogism and “hero”)as informing and generative principles of writing pedagogy. Modern readers will find much to value as Bakhtin illustrates contextualized grammar instruction, defines grammar as an element of style, proposes innovative teaching methods, and advocates for theory-based pedagogy. Despite these significant similarities, the essay relies exclusively on stylistics, ignoring the demonstrable rhetorical effects of the stylistic choices illustrated in the pedagogy he outlines. In perhaps his most illuminating move, Bakhtin introduces his notion of hero directly into the language arts classroom, illustrating the concept as fundamental even to the grammar and style of language in everyday and academic (not simply literary) contexts.

This article examines the dialectical nature of Mikhail Bakhtin’s developmental understanding of language learning. In particular, the author discusses the pedagogically illuminating relationship between literary style and everyday style, especially as the latter emerges from and returns to lived life. Drawing parallels with other related oppositions, such as Vygotsky’s spontaneous and scientific concepts, as well as Bakhtin’s early antithesis of life and art, the author emphasizes Bakhtin’s interest in relational (dialogical) rather than formal understandings of grammar, style, and literature. The author concludes with three possible implications of Bakhtin’s pedagogical essay for writing teachers: (a) that we acknowledge the creative expression already present in the everyday speech of our students, (b) that we reconsider the specifically dialogical use of linguistic and literary models, and (c) that we attend to the performative aspect of style and the teaching of style.

The three authors writing on Bakhtin’s essay, “Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar”—Farmer, Halasek, and Williams—respond to one another, and Bazerman provides a summative comment in the paragraphs that follow. The responses explore further some of Bakhtin’s thoughts concerning rhetoric and its relation to stylistics and his use of the concept of hero as a grammatical category. The discussion of Bakhtin leads to more general questions of the relation between spontaneous utterance and situationality and the implications for the possibility of a systematic grammar of style. Nonetheless, the commentators agree on Bakhtin’s explicit pedagogy and the interanimation of everyday speech with literary examples. The editor’s final comment notes a tension that informs all these responses, that is, between explicit teaching, on one hand, and avoiding formulaic writing, on the other. Bakhtin’s changing view of the relation of dialectics and dialogue is discussed as well.

This article documents aspects of the history of support for scholarship by two professional organizations involved with teaching composition at the postsecondary level: the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Evidence is found that for the past two decades, the two organizations have substantially withdrawn their sponsorship of one kind of scholarship. That scholarship is defined as RAD: replicable, aggregable, and data supported. The history of RAD scholarship as published in NCTE and CCCC books and journals, compared to that published elsewhere, is traced from 1940 to 1999 in three areas: teaching of the research paper, gain in writing skills during a writing course, and methods of peer critique. The history of NCTE and CCCC attempts at scholarly bibliography is also traced. Implications are considered for the future of the study of college composition as an academic discipline.

This article presents research from a qualitative study of the way that reflective writing is solicited, taught, composed, and assessed within a state-mandated portfolio curriculum. The research situates reflective texts generated by participating students within the larger goals and bureaucratic processes of the school system. The study finds that reflective letters are a genre within the state curriculum that regulates the substance and tone of students’ reflections. At the classroom level, the genre provides a mode that students adopt with the assurance that their reflections will meet state evaluators’ expectations. At the bureaucratic level, the genre helps to continually validate the state’s portfolio curriculum through its strong encouragement of stylized narratives of progress. The study demonstrates the importance of understanding how large-scale assessments shape pedagogy and students’ writing.

This article reports on an empirical study undertaken at the University of the North, South Africa, to test personal classroom observation and anecdotal evidence about the persistent gap between writing and spoken proficiencies among learners of English as a second language. A comparative and contrastive analysis of speech samples in the study showed a significant higher proportion of morpho-syntactic nonstandard forms in the learners’ written compositions and more nonstandard discourse forms in their oral presentations. As a result, it is argued that this gap may be minimized when learners’written interlanguage variety is used productively as a means toward normative writing proficiency. Recommendations for remedial instruction in second-language writing pedagogy, within the framework of Cummins’s conversational abilities and academic language proficiency, are offered for adaptation in comparable situations.

This study examines how first language and the type of writing task affect undergraduates’ word usage from source readings in their English writing. Of 87 participating university undergraduates, 39 were native English speakers from a 1st-year writing course in a North American university, whereas 48 were 3rd-year Chinese students learning English as a second language in a university in China. Using two preselected source texts, half of the students in each group completed a summary task; the other half completed an opinion task. Students’ drafts and the source texts were compared to identify exact or near verbatim retention of strings of words from sources with or without acknowledgement. A two-way ANOVA indicated that both task and first language had an effect on the amount of words borrowed. The study found that students who did the summary task borrowed more words than those who wrote the opinion essays, and Chinese students used source texts mostly without citing references for either task.

The purpose of Study 1a was to determine the criteria that differentiate students who perform well and those who perform poorly on a standardized test of university-level writing. Discriminant function analysis revealed that measures of structure, sentencing, paragraphing, and grammar play the most important role in separating these two groups. These results were used in Study 1b to develop a tutorial attended by an independent group of students preparing to write a standardized writing exam. The intervention had a positive effect on their test performance. Participants reported the tutorial to be useful, committed fewer errors on most of the criteria, and had a higher probability of passing the exam. It was concluded that this type of tutorial is beneficial to students who are preparing for such exams and may have wider educational use for those seeking assistance with their writing skills.

The article explores the purpose and methods of teaching the personal narrative in foreign language classrooms. Following a cross-cultural comparison of the history, purpose, and form of autobiography in first-language contexts in the United States and Japan; a review of the place of personal narrative in second- and foreign-language compo sition theory and practice; and the results from survey research involving 160 Japanese freshman students about high school writing instruction in English, a rationale and methodology for teaching personal narrative to Japanese college students of English is presented. The five-paragraph, thesis-driven personal essay presented in English as a second language/English as a foreign language textbooks is critiqued, with recommendations for a more organic form synthesizing story and essay, as in Barrington's concept of “scene, summary and musing.” The limitations of peer editing are discussed, and the bundan writing workshop is described as an effective alternative.

Historically, annotations have provided a means for discussing texts and teaching students about reading practices. This study argues that giving students annotated readings can influence their perceptions of the social context of a writing-from-sources task. Over 120 students read variously annotated letters to the editor, wrote response essays, and answered recall and attitude questionnaires. Evaluative annotations influenced students'perceptions of the text: Passages annotated with positive evaluations were rated as more persuasive than identical passages without annotations; passages annotated with negative evaluations were perceived as less persuasive. Students' global attitudes to the issue were unaffected. Evaluative annotations seemed to decrease student writers' reliance on summary and encourage advanced engagement with source materials. However, some annotations appeared to have negative impacts on essays, causing students to include irrelevant information. Ahypothesis that the perceived position of the annotator shapes students'conceptions of the rhetorical task is advanced and lent limited support.

In this examination of Mexican-American bilingual college writers, it is argued that implicit language ideologies, common misconceptions about bidialectalism/bilingualism, and the classroom attitudinal domain subvert the success of ethnolinguistic minority students. The author designed and conducted a randomized language attitude survey (N = 195) of 1st-year composition students on the assumption that language attitudes, reflective of the social/ethnic/linguistic polarization of south Texas, exist inside the English classroom. Findings correlate the multiple ethnolinguistic identities of this student population with language myth adherence. Results reveal the tendency among college writers for subscription to various language myths: dialect misconception, English bias, language purity myth, literacy myth, misconception of oral performance.

This study describes the extent to which shared assumptions of literary scholars form part of an introductory literature course. Fahnestock and Secor, in The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism, describe five special topoi of literary criticism (appearance/reality, paradigm, ubiquity, contemptus mundi, and paradox) that characterize the warrants of literary criticism appearing in a sample of major literary studies journals. This study triangulates ethnographic data of a class's meetings, analyses of students' essays, and questionnaires to discover whether these topoi are communicated to students in a survey course, whether students recognize and use them, and whether students are rewarded for using them. The special topoi of literary criticism appear in the discourse of instructors and students. Though textual analysis did not reveal a connection between using the special topoi in writing assignments and receiving a higher grade, questionnaires revealed that students adept at recognizing literary values and discourse conventions were more successful.

Although Toulmin models of argumentation are pervasive in composition textbooks, research on the model's use in writing classrooms has been scarce'typically limited to evaluating how students' essays align with the model's elements (claim, data, warrant, qualifier, rebuttal, backing) construed as objective standards. That approach discounts Toulmin's emphasis on context. In contrast, this study of a major university's summer composition program for high school students employs Wenger's notion of communities of practice and Bakhtin's notion of response to trace how classroom contexts mediate students' and teachers' understandings of a Toulmin model. The article presents a case study of a controversy that emerged when participants attempted to identify the main claim in one student's essay. The controversy arose, the analysis suggests, as participants positioned competing tacit and explicit representations of claims with/against other rhetorical terms (for example, thesis), variously interpreted the assigned tasks, and negotiated over tasks and texts.

Using the notion of design developed as part of the New London Group's Multiliteracies Project, this qualitative multicase study examines undergraduate academic literacy as a multimodal achievement game. Retrospective interviews and textual analyses revealed a series of operations on course content that constituted moves in the game. The goal of the game was to find, move, and display content, including not only facts but also concepts and forms of situated knowledge that would gain the highest points on assessments. Better “players” were more aware than their lower achieving counterparts of the game as specific activity different from learning. They also had more nuanced and planned versions of the operations that began with what was expected on assessments and moved backwards toward sources. Findings support forms of preparing students for academic success through the multiliteracies pedagogy that combines consciousness raising through overt instruction with forms of immersion and critical analysis.

The assessment of students' writing skills through essays is a common practice in educational institutions. Scoring of essays requires considerable judgment on the part of those who rate the response. When raters assign different scores to an essay, testing practitioners must resolve the discrepancy before computing an operational score to report to the examinee. This study investigated five forms of score resolution that were reported in a national survey of state department of education-testing agencies. The study examined the effect that each form of resolution has on the reliability of the resulting operational scores. It is shown that some methods of resolution can be associated with higher interrater reliability than can others. It is also shown that the choice of resolution can affect the magnitude of the reported score as well as the final passing rate of an assessment.

In this study, the author examines the ways a small group of students and their teacher from an intermediate-level university writing class use the texts they create to negotiate private and shared public understandings of the complex interactional contexts of their work together. The author begins by examining some of the competing goals and motives that energize the participants' classroom efforts. To understand the sources of those diverse purposes and how they serve to shape and sustain subsequent classroom interactions, the author develops an activity-based framework of analysis that draws extensively from dialogical and functional-linguistic approaches to language, context, and interaction. Writing and written communication are portrayed as linguistically mediated and interactively structured processes of contextualization. Implications for how we conceptualize and organize classroom interactions, such as intensive peer review and student-teacher conferencing, and the central role that talk and writing must play in operationalizing those interactional contexts are discussed.