The inquiry posed two basic research questions: a) Could changes in student writing be tied to conferencing, and b) Could the status of the student (weaker or stronger student, native or non-native speaker) or the type of writing course (general freshman composition or specialized genre-specific course) be tied to any systematic differences in the conferencing process or its outcome? This study tracked the discourses generated by 4 teachers around a set of their teacher-student writing conferences. They collected copies of first drafts, tapes of their conferences, and copies of subsequent drafts from one stronger and one weaker student, for a total of 8 students and 32 texts. All students revised their papers in ways indicating that the conference had had an effect on their revision process. The findings indicate that what is ostensibly the “same” treatment does not generate the same response from all students. They also indicate that the divergent backgrounds students bring to instructional events have a structuring effect that cannot be dismissed solely as teacher bias and self-fulfilling prophecy

This article reports on how three English-speaking advisors and their non-native English-speaking doctoral students used citations and related writing techniques to make new knowledge claims in science dissertation writing. The study focuses on the introductory chapter of the dissertations. The research data consist of drafts of the students’ dissertations, analysis of the draft texts, observations during writing conferences and lab meetings, background interviews, and in-progress interviews. The study investigated: 1) the selection of cited works; 2) how the students and their advisors contextualized their research and made claims to novelty; 3) how the advisors inducted their students into the disciplinary culture and its citation practices; and 4) the influence of language and cultural differences on the students and their advisors. The findings revealed that the academic advisors played an important role in helping their three graduate students learn how to construct new knowledge claims. The study also found no negative influence from the students’ native language and culture on their acquisition of academic language and conventions.

Chinese students experience many difficulties in developing communicative competence in English in their English as a Foreign Language (EFL) courses in China. This essay provides cultural information that may be useful for researchers and American EFL teachers of Chinese-born students, in Chinese or American universities. It first reviews the pedagogical approaches used by native Chinese-speaking teachers of English in an educational environment grounded in Confucian precepts for teaching, learning, and educational roles and responsibilities. It suggests that many of the limitations on Chinese students’ learning of English stem from a traditional teacher-centeredc lassroom and the use of rote-memorys trategies. After noting the obstacles faced by Chinese EFL teachers who have tried to implement communicative approaches, this essay offers guidelines for reconciling a communicative approach with traditional Chinese methods

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.

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.

A discussion of the effect of writing on ESL students’ reading performance provides data to demonstrate that “formal,” analytical written response to text helps ESL students become more proficient readers of English.

Bilingual education is the use of the native tongue to instruct limited EngUshspeaking children.The authors read studies of bilingual education from the earliest period of this literature to the most recent.Of the 300 program evaluations read, only 72 (25%) were methodologically acceptable-that is, they had a treatment and control group and a statistical control for pre-treatment differences where groups were not randomly assigned.Virtually all of the studies in the United States were of elementary or junior high school students and Spanish speakers; The few studies conducted outside the United States were almost all in Canada.The research evidence indicates that, on standardized achievement tests, transitional bilingual education (TBE) is better than regular classroom instruction in only 22% of the methodologically acceptable studies when the outcome is reading, 7% of the studies when the outcome is language, and 9% of the studies when the outcome is math.TBE is never better than structured immersion, a special program for limited English proficient children where the children are in a self-contained classroom composed solely of English learners, but the instruction is in English at a pace they can understand.Thus, the research evidence does not support transitional bilingual education as a superior form of instruction for limited English proficient children.

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Anecdotal evidence suggests that using a restricted language called Simplified English (SE) to write procedural documents is the best method to accommodate specific audiences. Providing empirical data to prove or disprove this hypothesis is the point of the experiment reported here. This study examined the effect of document type (SE versus non-SE), passage (Procedure A versus Procedure B), and native language (native versus non-native English speakers) on the comprehensibility, identification of content location, and task completion time of procedure documents for airplane maintenance. This research suggests that using SE significantly improves the comprehensibility of more complex documents. Further, readers of more complex SE documents can more easily locate and identify information within the document. For the documents tested in this experiment, the SE and non-SE documents took essentially the same amount of time for subjects to read and complete the test. Finally, while the difference between native and non-native English speakers could not be tested statistically because of extremely different cell sizes, the comprehensibility and content location scores for the native and non-native speakers appear to be quite different, with the non-native speakers benefiting from SE more than the native speakers.

People who write in English as a second or foreign language often find it difficult to write clear, coherent, idiomatic English. Contrastive rhetoric studies the structure of language beyond the sentence (discourse), as well as the influence of culture on writing. Findings from contrastive research should be incorporated into writing instruction and teacher training to give nonnative speakers of English more help in writing for the world of work.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Persuasive/argumentativew riting is an importanta nd difficult mode of discourse for student writers. It is particularly problematic for non-native speakers, who often bring both linguistic and rhetorical deficits to the task of persuasion in English. This study analyzed 60 persuasive texts by university freshman composition students, half of whom were native speakers and half of whom were non-native speakers of English for 33 quantitative, topical structure, and rhetorical variables. The results showed clear differences between the essays of native and non-native speakers. These results and their implications for second language composition instruction are discussed.

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English in America: A Radical View of the Profession and The Politics of Letters , Richard Ohmann John Trimbur Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1870-1990: A Curricular History , David R. Russell Martha A. Townsend How Writers Teach Writing, Nancy Kline Janis Forman Reading as RhetoricalAction: Knowledge, Persuasion, and the Teaching of Research-Based Writing, Doug Brent Christina Haas Understanding ESL Writers, Ilona Leki Liz Hamp-Lyons Assessing Second Language Writing in Academic Contexts, Liz Hamp-Lyons Ilona Leki Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Literacy Research, Richard Beach, Judith L. Green, Michael L. Kamil, and Timothy Shanahan Dan Madigan Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers, Myron C. Tuman Christine M. Neuwirth

Existing research on lecture comprehension and note-taking, and a course designed to teach nonnative English-speaking college students lecture comprehension strategies and note-taking techniques, are discussed. Nine listening strategies and eight note-taking techniques, focusing on both macro- and micromarkers in lecture discourse, are introduced. The strategies and techniques are taught progressively and are accompanied by specially designed listening tasks. Improved student performance is shown by a t-test comparing the pre-test and the post-test scores. Suggestions are made to native English speaking lecturers on how they may adapt their lecturing styles and methods of presentation to help non-native audiences cope with lectures successfully.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

With the formation of the European Economic Area in 1992, the demand for good technical communicators has grown rapidly. To satisfy that demand under specifically European conditions, courses in technical communication must have high status, be flexible, use distance‐learning techniques, and meet the needs of in‐service communicators. Such courses should concentrate on four skill areas: composition, text‐handling, elicitation (including foreign languages), and specialized technical areas. Courses must also make use of experienced practitioners and be validated by the appropriate professional institutions.

In The Idea of a Writing Center, Stephen M. North takes task his colleagues in university English departments for their unenlightened views: For them, a writing center is illiteracy what a cross between Lourdes and a hospice would be serious illness...(435). In the nineties when multiculturalism is all the rage and American universities attract larger and larger numbers of international students. North and his kind may need take on a different Goliath. Now that we've overcome the idea of writing centers as the proofreading-shop [s]-in-the basement (North 444), we may need battle the idea of writing centers as sentence-scrubbers-for-foreignstudents as my colleague Ray Smith says. But if the writing center does not exist merely to serve, supplement, back up, complement, reinforce, or otherwise be defined by any external curriculum (North 440), how is it ever become a place where non-native writers can receive remediation and guidance? What changes will have be made in the philosophy of the writing center and in the job descriptions of tutors? Anyone who has worked in a college writing center for any length of time will know the plight of international students who have demonstrated some level of English proficiency by achieving a requisite score on a discrete-item grammar and vocabulary test such as the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). However, scores (enough get in the door) do not always translate into satisfactory academic writing (enough leave with a diploma in hand). As undergraduates, these students join

The education of composition teachers, tutors, and researchers about culturally influenced rhetorical differences in writing, or contrastive rhetoric, is usually limited, often consisting of brief explanations of Robert Kaplan's 1966 diagrams purporting to represent the rhetorics of five cultural traditions: Oriental, English, Semitic, Russian, and Romance. Frequently reprinted in teacher-training sources, the diagrams are only briefly and unproblematically explained in his own controversial terms (e.g., "the Oriental writer" and "Oriental rhetoric") as if they depicted the Truth about five complex rhetorical traditions. For example, the five drawings discussed in Kaplan's vocabulary appear in a seven-page section entitled "Cultural Differences" in Muriel Harris' Teaching One-to-One: The Writing Conference, the guidebook for many writing center tutor-training programs. These models have been assumed factual and further disseminated at numerous presentation at writing center conferences (Xia Wang and Liu Yue; James Robinson, et al.). The increasing number of writing center publications and conference sessions on English-as-a-Second-Language issues such as contrastive rhetoric reflects the increasing number of international students using and working in writing centers. It is important that international students be approached by tutors with a stance that acknowledges the complexities of the rhetorics of different languages and cultures.

Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880, Carl F. Kaestle, with Helen Damon-Moore, Lawrence C. Stedman, Katherine Tinsley, and William Vance Trollinger, Jr. Richard Arthur Courage Academic Literacies: The Public and Private Discourse of University Students, Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater Ronald A. Sudol Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, Jay David Bolter David Kaufer, Chris Neuwirth, and Myron Tuman At the Point of Need: Teaching Basic and ESL Writers, Marie Wilson Nelson Vivian Zamel ESL in America: Myths and Possibilities, Sarah Benesch Nancy Duke S. Lay Grammar and the Teaching of Writing: Limits and Possibilities, Rei R. Noguchi Constance Weaver Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects, Martha Kolln Thomas J. Farrell Doing Grammar, Max Morenberg Paul Jude Beauvais Textbooks in Focus: Handbooks A Writer’s Handbook: Style and Grammar, James D. Lester New Concise Handbook, Hans P. Guth The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers, Maxine Hairston and John J. Ruszkiewicz Dennis Shramek Selected Essays of Edward P. J. Corbett, Robert J. Connors James L. Kinneavy Interviewing Practices for Technical Writers, Earl E. McDowell Alice I. Philbin

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.

ESL in America looks at the social economic, and political contexts of second language and bilingual education.

The rationale behind teaching native English speakers to be sensitive to the cultural differences they will find when they communicate with nonnative speakers in the classroom and in the professional marketplace is considered. A teaching strategy that technical writing instructors can use in their classrooms to foster cultural awareness is described in detail. It is concluded that such an educational strategy is important for a future in which interaction with multicultural colleagues becomes inevitable and essential for business success.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

The legal and ethical issues raised by the ability to use desktop scanners to convert images into digital data for manipulation, enhancement, and eventual incorporation into a publication are discussed. Potential legal problems involve copyright infringement and libel, both of which are familiar concerns to technical writers, although they tend to be associated with text rather than graphic images. Ethical issues raised by the available technology include concerns about enhanced advertisements. To maintain public confidence in digitally processed images, technical communicators in academia must provide guidelines for their students, both US and international, who will encounter many of these legal and ethical issues in the workplace.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

It is argued that foreign students, who spend four or more years studying at US universities, often do not realize how much their years in America have changed them. Nor do they realize that these changes will have a profound effect on them when they return to their native cultures. The difficulty they will have upon returning to their home countries has been called cultural reentry shock. The professional writing classroom seems a good place for educators to make foreign students aware of cultural reentry shock. Teachers can define the various problems associate with this phenomenon, lead students in discussion of the problems, and propose ways to ease the severity of the problems. Writing assignments may be structured in such a way as to allow students to do self analysis of the changes they may have undergone during their years in the US. The students can be encouraged to design their technical documents using their native environments as the source of data, examples, and issues to write about. These documents can also be written for an audience in the native culture, rather than to an American audience.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

There are differences of vocabulary, grammar, and usage in American English and British English. As international interchange of information increases, we must alert writers and editors to these differences, and encourage them to find forms of expression common to both versions of English. If they do not, their texts may create difficulties, not only for readers using English as a foreign language, but also for native speakers of American English or British English.

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.

The study was conducted in a classroom that used a process approach to literacy. Ten case studies examined the ability of 6th grade Hispanic bilingual students to construct meaning in dialogue journals and literature logs in first and second language. Journals and literature logs were coded and analyzed for language code (L1/L2), topic, codeswitching, sensitivity to audience, writer’s voice, spelling, and grammatical structures. Findings indicate that students were more effective in constructing meaning in dialogue journals than in literature logs. Success in the journals revealed positive self-images while failure with literature logs evoked poor self-concepts. Findings also suggest that implementation of process approaches can pose its own set of instructional problems that need to be addressed, especially when effectiveness is judged in terms of the particular students involved. For example, although the students in this study were able to write in English before having complete control of the language, their development of complex ideas and the construction of meaning suffered considerably. The length and quality of the writing also degenerated when the topic was imposed, when students found no relevance in the literacy activity, and when they were not assisted in contextualizing writing tasks in their own terms. Overall, mere exposure to standard writing conventions did not improve the students’ use of them. The practice of implementing popular instructional programs without incorporating appropriate social, cultural, and linguistic adaptations appears to be ineffective with L2 learners.

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.

The results of a survey of 1001 professionals in Taiwan's high-technology industries are presented. The survey describes how these professionals use English communication skills in their work. The data should help Taiwanese universities and industries design or modify English communication skills courses. The survey also offers a specific example form which one can draw general appraisals of the extent to which English has become an international language in the high-technology industries. The study confirms the seriousness of the need for nonnative English-speaking professionals to improve their English language skills. Even with at least ten years of English training, a majority of the professionals surveyed feel that they do not communicate effectively in English, and they want continued instruction in some aspect of English communication.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Arguing that current research has fragmented educators’ vision of both written language and development, this article aims to contribute to a more integrative vision, one that preserves the integrity of written language as a symbol system. Based on a critical consideration of literature both on written language growth and on the role of symbols in human experience, the article suggests five principles that would seem to characterize written language development: the establishment of equivalences, exploration and orchestration of the system, reliance on shifting relationships of form and function, differentiation and integration of symbolic functions, and participation in social dialogue. These principles highlight the dialectical relationship between function and form, between child construction and adult guidance. The articulated vision of development differs in fundamental ways from most current viewpoints, as it does not consider written language as simply an extension of the child’s oral language but as the evolution of a distinct symbolic option with links to the child’s entire symbolic repertoire. The implications of this viewpoint for both sociopolitical and pedagogical issues of literacy construction in early schooling are discussed.

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.

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Examining the relationship between language and literacy and the societal experiences that help shape it, this political and polemical book builds on the author's previous work in reader-response criticism and challenges the now dominant assumption that language is an individual transaction independent of any social context. Moving through a series of interrelated essays, David Bleich explores topics including the social psychology of men, which he maintains exerts undue influence on everyone's education; conceptions of knowledge now offered by feminist epistemologists; social conceptions of language and knowledge found in the work of G.H. Mead, L.S. Vygotsky, Ludwik Fleck, and Mikhail Bakhtin; the influence of gender on language use; the views of current thinkers on the social character of the classroom and academic communities; and the process of individual language development.

Preface - Sidney Greenbaum Introduction - Alan C Purves PART ONE: THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS Culture, Writing and the Curriculum - Judit Kadar-Fulop The Problem of Comparability of Writing Tasks - Anneli Vahapassi Developing a Rating Method for Stylistic Preference - R Elaine Degenhart and Sauli Takala A Cross-Cultural Pilot Study PART TWO: NATIONAL DIFFERENCES IN WRITING STYLES Writers in Hindi and English - Yamuna Kachru Cultural Variation in Persuasive Student Writing - Ulla Connor and Janice Lauer Cultural Variation in Reflective Writing - Robert Bickner PART THREE: TRANSFER OF RHETORICAL PATTERNS IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING The Second Language Learner and Cultural Transfer in Narration - Anna Soter Narrative Styles in the Writing of Thai and American Students - Chantanee Indrasuta Cultural Differences in Writing and Reasoning Skills - Sybil Carlson The Rating of Student Performance in Written Composition - Young Mok Park PART FOUR: SUMMING UP Contrastive Rhetoric and Second Language Learning - Robert B Kaplan Notes Toward a Theory of Contrastive Rhetoric

This book constitutes an interesting guide to recent developments in vocabulary studies. As will be made clear below, this review addresses researchers and others interested in issues concerning computational morphology and lexicography in a Machine Translation (MT) environment. For this reason we focus more on relevant chapters of the book than on those which concern pure language teaching and language learning issues. The book is divided into three parts. Part one contains four chapters devoted to the analysis of lexis with a particular emphasis on its role in discourse contexts. Part two consists of three chapters dealing mostly with issues related to language learning, language teaching and lexicography. Part three includes two case studies in lexical stylistics based on informant analyses. Chapter 1 explores the notion of word. A definition based on orthographic criteria (i.e. a word viewed as a sequence of letters bound on either side by a space or a punctuation mark) is taken into consideration. Nevertheless, it is observed that such a definition is violated by the existence of a great number of multi- word units (e.g. instead of, post box, etc.). On the other hand, the phonological criterion for defining a word as a string of phonemes containing only one stress is also not felicitous, firstly because it only concerns spoken language and secondly because a stress can be used as a demarcator of strings for emphatic purposes. Other problems relate to the existence of several forms for only one lexical meaning (e.g. verbal allomorphs of the same inflectional paradigm: bring, brings, brought, bringing), as well as to the appearance of the same form for different meanings (e.g. the different meanings of the word/a/r). The case of idioms (e.g. to kick the bucket) involving more than one text word which, semantically, can be substituted by a single word is also problematic. In attempting to provide a good criterion for defining a word, Carter uses the valuable concept of lexeme which helps to override most of the problems mentioned above (e.g. the existence of different form variants for the same word). He correctly observes that are the basic contrasting units of vocabulary in a language. When we look up in a dictionary we are looking up lexemes rather than words (p. 7).

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.

Editing in a bilingual, bicultural environment involves many of the same problems and frustrations as editing in a monolingual environment; however, the bilingual, bicultural environment often exacerbates these problems. Editing is further complicated by linguistic interference among the author's languages. Finally, culturally conditioned attitudes toward the duties and responsibilities of the editor create areas of potential conflicts between editor and author. If technical participation of non-native English speakers is to increase, as hoped for in such endeavors as President Reagan's policy of the Caribbean Basin Initiative, editors must be sensitive toward those problems in such complicated circumstances.

Classrooms filled with glassy-eyed students provide an experiential base for Alice S. Horning s new comprehensive theory about basic writers.Horning explores the theory of writing acquisition in detail. Her examination of spoken and written language and redundancy give a theoretical base to her argument that academic discourse is a separate linguistic system characterized by particular psycholinguistic features. She proposes that basic writers learn to write as other learners master a second language because for them, academic written English is a whole new language.She explores the many connections to be found in second language acquisition research to the teaching and learning of writing and gives special attention to the interlanguage hypothesis, pidginization theory, and the Monitor theory. She also addresses the role of affective factors (feelings, attitudes, emotions, and motivation) in the success or failure of writing students.

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Scientists and engineers have to present technical information effectively. But when they do it, they face language difficulties which are beyond formal grammar as taught at school. To overcome this problem, we designed a systematic course for technical writing aimed at breaking such language barriers by planned channeling of the scientific message. The course was designed to improve the communication skills of scientists and engineers. In keeping with this goal effective writing criteria were defined and formal presentation conventions were described. Because Hebrew is the common language in Israel, problems of Hebrew structures were presented. The massive infiltration of vocabulary and syntactic elements from foreign languages into scientists' Hebrew style were addressed. An evaluation apparatus was also applied and future prospects of the course were discussed.

Every year, a great many foreign experts come to China to present their research achievements and products. Needless to say, all of them hope that their presentations will be successful, but the truth is that some of them fail, because they do not take into account the participants' background and language capability. Some practical information about Chinese audiences, the foreign language levels of both interpreters and scientists, and ways to make a presentation appealing to the Chinese technical community, is given.