Students in first-year composition (FYC) courses are expected to control the mechanics, vocabulary, style, and grammatical accuracy of their writing. Yet language development support, particularly that of grammar instruction in US FYC courses, has largely disappeared in recent decades, due in part to suppositions that students implicitly know grammar. This assumption is problematic given the increasing number of multilingual writers enrolling in US schools with observed needs for explicit language instruction. The present study explores whether first- and second-language writers of English perceived a need for language instruction and whether they wanted or expected it. Students from 12 sections of FYC were asked in surveys and interviews about their prior language learning experiences and current self-perceived language needs and then were asked to complete one of two self-directed language development projects (LDPs): an online, self-selected grammar and usage study project or journal entries focusing on vocabulary/style in texts they had read. Student work was collected, analyzed, and supplemented with students’ end-of-term observations and preferences about self-directed LDPs. Our findings reveal that students overwhelmingly wanted and expected language instruction and were largely positive about both types of LDPs, but they felt that language instruction should be offered in multiple delivery methods beyond just self-study. With these findings in mind, we offer pedagogical suggestions for addressing the perceived and real needs for language development of linguistically diverse FYC students.

With growing interest in the relationship between translation and language learning, a number of studies have begun to examine the pedagogical value of translation and explore the best ways to utilize it in L2 classrooms. Some may doubt the need to include translation in L2 classrooms when language pedagogy is a far more wellestablished discipline. An answer to this concern requires empirical research on the role of translation in the L2 classroom. To this end, this study compares how L2 learners react to particular translation tasks and writing tasks. The findings suggest that translation tasks can yield better results than direct L2 writing tasks in encouraging and facilitating students to improve their lexis and grammar. The results also suggest that both translation and writing tasks have greater potential to prompt lexical than grammatical improvement. These findings offer new insights into alternative writing instruction and contribute to an increasing body of research on the pedagogical value of translation in L2 classrooms.

Research problem: Readability equations are widely used to compute how well readers will be able to understand written materials. Those equations were usually developed for nontechnical materials, namely, textbooks for elementary, middle, and high schools. This study examines to what extent computerized readability predictions are consistent for highly technical material - selected Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and International Standards Organization (ISO) Recommended Practices and Standards relating to driver interfaces. Literature review: A review of original sources of readability equations revealed a lack of specific criteria in counting various punctuation and text elements, leading to inconsistent readability scores. Few studies on the reliability of readability equations have identified this problem, and even fewer have systematically investigated the extent of the problem and the reasons why it occurs. Research questions: (1) Do the most commonly used equations give identical readability scores? (2) How do the scores for each readability equation vary with readability tools? (3) If there are differences between readability tools, why do they occur? (4) How does the score vary with the length of passage examined? Method: Passages of varying lengths from 12 selected SAE and ISO Recommended Practices and Standards were examined using five readability equations (Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog Index, SMOG Index, Coleman-Liau Index, and Automated Readability Index) implemented five ways (four online readability tools and Microsoft Word 2013 for Windows). In addition, short test passages of text were used to understand how different readability tools counted text elements, such as words and sentences. Results and conclusions: The mean readability scores of the passages from those 12 SAE and ISO Recommended Practices and Standards ranged from the 10th grade reading level to about 15th. The mean grade reading levels computed across the websites were: Flesch-Kincaid 12.8, Gunning Fog 15.1 SMOG 12.6, Coleman-Liau 13.7, and Automated Readability Index 12.3. Readability score estimates became more consistent as the length of the passage examined increased, with no noteworthy improvements beyond 900 words. Among the five readability tools, scores typically differed by two grade levels, but the scores should have been the same. These differences were due to how compound and hyphenated words, slashes, numbers, abbreviations and acronyms, and URLs were counted, as well other punctuation and text elements. These differences occurred because the sources for these equations often did not specify how to score various punctuation and text elements. Of the tools examined, the authors recommend Microsoft Word 2013 for Windows if the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is required.

Research problem: The enhancement of communication skills among engineering students has been a focus within the engineering curriculum for many years. Despite this emphasis, continual published reports document that engineering graduates are not well versed in the areas of written and oral communication when they graduate and transition into industrial-based positions. This study focuses on examining whether game-based pedagogy could serve as a potential tool for enhancing the written and oral communication skills of engineering undergraduates. Research questions: (1) What is the relationship between communication game exposure and oral and written communication skills achievement in engineering students? (2) Do engineering students' perceptions of their oral and written communication skills development associated with participation in communication games align with their achievement in these areas? Literature review: This study examines the ability of games to enhance engineering student communication skills by using the lens of activity theory. This communication theory was chosen because it describes how the creation of a piece of communication goes beyond traditional features such as grammar and syntax to include grappling with the objective or goal of the work, the system within which the product must be completed, and the methods selected to subdivide the work. These same constraints were imposed on the students within this study, in which they were assigned a technical design report and infomercial (or elevator pitch) to assess their oral and written communication skills. Methodology: Three groups of a sophomore-level Introduction to Chemical Product Design course compared non-games, games, and games-plus instructional methods. Student design reports and infomercials were scored by two analysts using reliable and validated rubrics. Team-based performance scores for each of the three sections were compared to determine whether any resulting differences in communication achievement were associated with the incorporation of game-based activities within the classroom. Students' perceptions of their communication skill development were measured through survey instruments and focus groups. The focus group data were content-analyzed by the same two analysts using a coding scheme developed from an emergent qualitative analysis of the focus group data. Results and conclusion: We found that the use of game-based pedagogy within engineering classes can enhance oral and written communication skills even though this method of instruction is not always perceived by students as relevant to their achievement in these areas.

Civic Jazz asks us to expand our understanding of what it means to say that jazz is an American art form. While Clark is clearly a fan, with an intimate knowledge of jazz, its culture, and community, this book offers more than anecdote and description, which is so common in jazz studies. Rather, this well-crafted book extends and offers a theoretical basis to the idea, put forward by Wynton Marsalis, Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, and most recently Barak Obama when speaking at the 2016 International Jazz Day Concert, that jazz expresses the American spirit. Clark finds his theoretical armature in Kenneth Burke's blurring of the boundary between rhetoric and poetic. As Clark argues, Burke's works articulate a rhetorical theory of aesthetics that is centered on the dispositional effects of form. Furthermore, and precisely because form is not restricted to the language arts, Burke's rhetorical aesthetics are singularly appropriate to a study of the civic role of jazz.Clark models his book on a jazz performance. The book offers neither a linear argument nor a dialectical movement from antitheses to synthesis. Rather, Clark weaves an account where theory, the rhetoric of jazz advocacy, and jazz performances themselves resonate harmoniously. Jazz becomes a representative anecdote for unpacking the details of Burke's political aesthetics, even while this developing theory provides a means to understand jazz's aesthetic workings and civic significance.In “Setting Up,” his first and introductory chapter, Clark advances the thesis/theme that jazz calls forth an identity and a form of living that manifest e pluribus unum. He introduces Burke's work, its cultural critique of America, and its call for a redemptive art of living. Aligning Burke with critics ranging from Walt Whitman to British literary theorist Terry Eagleton, Clark explains how Burke looked at America and how when he saw division, turned to rhetoric and its capacity to overcome it by fostering identification through form. Clark then takes up the difficult task of extending rhetorical theory and criticism to jazz as a historically situated and significant art form and looks to jazz writers and musicians who describe such rhetorical processes in their music. Clark establishes his bona fides by citing broadly: he revisits Aristotle's and Suzanne Langer's reflections on music, gestures toward Ingrid Monson's recent jazz musicology, and takes up the African American reflections on jazz of Ralph Ellison and Wynton Marsalis. These provide the means for him to develop the idea that jazz is constitutional and that its workings can be explained in terms of the rhetoric of form.Each chapter returns to, explores, and augments this initial theme, much as each chorus of a well-crafted jazz solo extends and develops those musical ideas that have preceded it and just as Burke notoriously returned, revised, and augmented own his prior efforts. In his second chapter, “A Rhetorical Aesthetic of Jazz,” Clark doubles down on Burke. While Burke never wrote on jazz, Clark finds in his work the means to capture jazz's civic function. Burke's Rhetoric of Motives describes the aesthetic experience of identification as “swinging along with the form” (58). In Clark's account, this link to jazz is more than fortuitous. Jazz was known as “swing” during its commercial heyday as America's main popular dance music, a reference to its pulsing, danceable rhythm and its contagious attitude, intensity, and energy. Furthermore, Burke was a young man during the “jazz age,” and was aware of African American musical styles, having favorably reviewed both a 1928 concert by the African American Jubilee Hall Singers and the 1933 African American Broadway musical Run, Little Chillun! Burke also corresponded regularly with African American intellectuals, notably Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man and Albert Murray, Ellison's friend and author of both Stompin' the Blues and The Omni-Americans, canonical texts on jazz and race in America.Clark considers “swinging along” to be an apt term to describe the activity of both musicians and audiences, who are guided by a faith that the musical work in progress will continue to cohere as it unfolds. Burke presented swinging along as a needed corrective to the American civic sphere, where cooperation is difficult. For Clark, jazz offers a model for such cooperation. This is because “jazz is an act of hopeful defiance of the alienation and fear that makes us hold ourselves back to avoid judgment or rejection” (26). Throughout the book, Clark describes singularly eloquent jazz performances, including an impromptu restaurant performance of “Route 66” by his thirteen-year-old daughter with noted jazz pianist Marcus Roberts, to illustrate the process and form of life that jazz offers. He selects Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley's rendition of “Autumn Leaves” to illustrate swinging cooperation and hopeful defiance. The reader can easily find the track online and follow Clark's commentary, which offers a sensitive analysis of how Miles and Cannonball swing along: in their improvisation, they depart from this standard's original form to explore, extend, and deepen its melancholy, using it as a resource for moving beyond, for crafting an aesthetic pathē of upward transcendence.Paradoxically Clark's third chapter, “What Jazz Is,” does not begin with a discussion of jazz, but with Burke's preoccupation with identity and his turn from literary self-expression to rhetoric. Clark retells the story of Burke's response to the turmoil and conflicts of the twentieth century. Originally a writer of poetry and fiction, Burke became a theorist and critic who, seeing America as in need of some type of transcendence, spent a career exploring how understanding, common feeling, identification, and consummation might be fostered through form. The problem in America, and indeed in any democracy, is that individual will and aspiration are in many ways antagonistic to identification and the consummatory experience of community. America's founding sides with the existential truth that our pains, our goals, and our lives are ultimately our own. In all cultures, ritual and civic arts mediate the tension between individual and community. In America, such arts are faced with a particular challenge. They cannot demand the full subordination of individual voices to an idealized unity, as does a church choir. Clark counterpoises a performance of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JALCO) to the unity of his church choir to illustrate how jazz negotiates this tension successfully. His choir follows a fixed arrangement and is guided by a choir master. In contrast, JALCO coordinates a complex of individual voices. JALCO is like a complex organism, where the written musical arrangements provide a basis for skilled jazz artists to make their own music, even as each artist and part coordinate with the whole.JALCO is for Clark exemplary of the art that Burke sought. Clark explains the jazz aesthetic by turning to jazz pedagogy, which encourages students to develop their own musical style, approaches, and voice, even though jazz is based in collective improvised performances. For Clark, jazz is singularly American in the way that it integrates the one in the many and also is forward looking, directed toward redemption. Clark turns to the blues to illustrate this American trait. Blues lyrics paint a bleak picture of pain and loss, even while the music's form and propulsive energy offer emotional coherence and hope. Robert Johnson may be standing at the crossroads and sinking down, but the music carries him and those who listen forward. As Albert Murray observed, borrowing from Burke, the blues are equipment for living, transforming desperation into defiance and joy.America's singular character is the theme of Clark's fourth chapter, “Where Jazz Comes From.” Clark focuses neither on New Orleans nor New York, neither on Chicago nor Kansas City, but on the conflict that Tocqueville saw at the center of the American spirit, where radical individualism leaves each person uprooted and solitary. This insight, first stated in his introduction, is Clark's original contribution to jazz studies. Jazz's origin is far more psychic than geographical or musicological. Jazz does not emerge from the mere musical encounter of African and European forms as much as from a reaction to American alienation, as expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American Renaissance, Walt Whitman, Louis L'Amour's cowboy pulp function, and Burke's search for a redemptive civic art. Curiously, race is not central to Clark's account. He acknowledges the racial fact of jazz but does not reflect pointedly on slavery's legacy or on the link between American alienation and its original sin. His account, consistent with Wynton Marsalis's narrative, presents jazz as pointing to a world without racial division. Clark insists that jazz is concerned with transcendence and gives new meaning to jazz pianist Bill Evans's observation that “‘jazz is not a what, it is a how’” (14). Clark presents jazz as a form of collective problem solving. Jazz transcends difference by casting new modes of experience and forms of being, by relying on improvised augmentation and complexification rather than the imposition of static melodies and harmonies. Paraphrasing Whitman, we could say that Clark tells us that jazz is large and contains multitudes.While Clark offers a redemptive vision of jazz, he also reminds us that none of this is painless. He recounts the troubled 1963 recording session of Money Jungle by jazz greats Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach. Musical styles, professional egos, and creative visions clashed. Neither the session nor resultant tracks were marked by harmonious identifications. Nevertheless, the conflict was productive. Clark refers to the music as “eloquent” as it strains to keep it together. Just as the purpose of the session was to produce an album, so the art of democracy is directed toward enabling a life in common, not a common life. Putting a happy face on an at times agonistic and tortured process, Clark describes jazz as another occasion for ad bellum purificandum, “a war waged with an attitude of goodwill … in the bright hope that something better for everyone will follow” (75).A great deal of jazz writing is descriptive and anecdotal, with stories of great bands and singular recordings sessions, battles with drug addiction, brilliant creators, and visionary promoters. Critical and theoretical work in jazz is relatively recent, having emerged in the last two or three decades, but as in rhetorical studies, description and historical anecdote play a crucial role and remain necessary. One of the pleasures of this book is Clark's strategic use of anecdotes as he returns to and elaborates on its main theme. One might find Clark redundant, but only if one fails to grasp his strategy of augmentation and his rhetorical celebration of jazz. Each chapter continues the process of explaining the formal theory of rhetorical aesthetics that underpins Burke's oeuvre even as they clarify the demands and workings of jazz as a civic art. Thus, in his fifth chapter “What Jazz Does,” Clark returns to Tocqueville's pessimism regarding America, to which he counterpoises jazz's possibilities and potential: jazz offers an image of what America would look like if America's three “taboo” divisive issues—race, freedom, and religion—were faced openly and worked through collectively (90). Clark turns to Billy Holiday's signature performance of “Strange Fruit,” Louis Armstrong's rendition of “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue,” and Duke Ellington's Black, Brown, and Beige suite as eloquent expressions of the African American experience. Clark devotes particular attention to Ellington's explicit attempt to reflect on “his people” as within the American people.Clark's account is compelling, although he does not fully resolve the underlying tension within rhetoric between identification and division. At one moment he praises jazz for offering a common aesthetic experience that offers, if only briefly, the upward transcendence that America requires to fulfill its democratic promise. Subsequently, however, he emphasizes the role of jazz in racial politics, in its lyrics of protest and in the musical expression of the pain of racism in the dissonance and wailing of free jazz. Clark attempts to resolve this tension by equating jazz with freedom, since each jazz performance raises the question of where to go next. Each soloist in part answers this question in tandem with the ensemble, and for Clark the American answer – and the jazz musician answer – is “to freedom, of course” (97). To many, jazz sounds free, which accounts for its appeal to dissidents in the USSR and Nazi Germany and for the American government's use of jazz in the Cold War. Clark notes the irony that black musicians were displayed as representatives of American freedom even while they suffered Jim Crow at home and offers free jazz and its challenge to conventional forms of expression as their rhetorical response.Of singular importance in Clark's fifth chapter is the idea that jazz is political and ethical not only because of its democratic performative pragmatics but because of its content, in both its musical forms and particular compositions. Jazz can be spiritual, in religious or secular terms, even as it is rhetorical, as in John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. Clark highlights the significance of the avant-garde and its embrace of self-expression as the best way to communicate. While spiritual experience is personal, familiarity with jazz, its traditions, and its musical figures makes shared experience possible. This is for Clark what John Dewey sought when he called on Americans collectively to search for the truth. Jazz can prompt reverence, civic humility, and awe. Jazz requires intense individualism and intense cooperation. Optimistically, Clark does not address the deeply competitive spirit at the heart of jazz and its “cutting contests,” jam sessions where each soloist seeks to best and at times show up the other. For Clark, the jazz situation is much like the rhetorical situation, but less agonistic, because each performance is a collective endeavor that ultimately requires cooperation. For Clark, jazz favors congregation over segregation. In America, the latter dominates and requires the corrective jazz offers.This book is about jazz, of course, but it is also concerned with extending Burke's rhetorical sensibility beyond the verbal arts. In his penultimate chapter, “How Jazz Works,” Clark turns to Burke's 1930s novel Towards a Better Life in order to work out the trajectory of his thought. In that early effort, a walk in the New England countryside summoned Burke's alienated protagonist to find happiness through living beyond himself. Burke revisited this path to happiness in his later critical and theoretical writings, working out the nature of being summoned or called. The summons has two related moments: One is summoned to summon others. For Clark, this is how music works. Clark follows Burke's constitutive turn in the Grammar of Motives. Clark incorporates Stanley Crouch's analogy of jazz to the Constitution as an “exercise of the ‘freedom to constantly reinterpret the meanings’” (20) that it provides, offering a way to perfect the American form of life. Resolutely American in his analysis, Clark cites Dewey, who argued that art provides immediate feeling through its structure and coherence. Clark suggests that for Burke, art's aim is not experience in itself but the organization of experience through form to create common sentiments and sensibilities. Art provides resources for better encountering and living with others. In other words, art offers the possibility of civic transcendence.Jazz is constitutive of democracy, as each in turn improvises over a given form, all the while responding to others and expanding the range of what is possible. Jazz musicians share a stock of knowledge and set of skills that enable them, without sheet music or a prior plan, to meet as strangers and play something new. The pragmatics or aesthetic constitution of jazz lets musicians call the tune in a way unheard of in the classical repertoire, just as the Constitution lets citizens call the tune.This insight is not new to Clark. Wynton Marsalis has said much the same thing, What Clark brings to the mix is a more sophisticated account of how jazz both is structured democratically and manifests a democratic aesthetic sensibility. To this end, Clark offers an innovative and well-developed account of Burke's project that links aesthetic form to attitude and identity. Indeed, Clark cites Burke's observation that music far more than speech adheres to the psychology of form. The power of music and other nonrepresentational arts arises not from cognitions but from the experience of form in the moment. Furthermore, jazz as an improvised music is always performed against the possibility of failure: its movement does not always produce the consummation that it seeks. Music opens onto changing the ways that people think. To illustrate, Clark turns to Duke Ellington and John Coltrane's rendition of “In a Sentimental Mood,” which offers a remarkable, and yet for jazz, everyday call to transcendence.Even though jazz is no longer a popular musical form, Clark insists that it offers precisely the form of interaction that Burke called for. He works this out again in his concluding chapter, entitled “So What,” after one of the most memorable tracks on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue. With no rehearsals and no sheet music, that session produced brilliant and innovative music because each in his ensemble was supremely conscious of the others. In this, Clark's insight and optimism shine through. Clark is driven by an appreciation of possibility. At the same time, however, he does not consider the difficulty of the art. Jazz is less democratic than it is aristocratic and republican. As with all arts, it is practiced by the bold, whose eloquence make their work look easy. Its “citizenry” is not enfranchised by birth but earns a place on the stand through displays of which requires of and Jazz is American and and indeed can offer transcendence and new but like rhetoric requires a life to the art.

Studies that have reported delayed positive effects for written corrective feedback (WCF) have typically targeted the use of articles for first- and subsequent- mention functions, using narrowly focused corrections that lack ecological validity. Not much is known about how different grammatical features react to mid-focused and unfocused WCF options, which enjoy more ecological validity. This study investigates the delayed effect of different types of WCF on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ accurate use of three features of English grammar (articles, infinitive, and unreal conditional). Four groups of participants (N = 77) were treated with different feedback options (mid-focused corrections, unfocused corrections, unfocused corrections plus revision, and no corrective feedback). WCF did not produce lasting accuracy gains, nor did it help corrected students outperform uncorrected students on a delayed posttest.

Welcome to the second issue of our third year of publication. As the journal has become more established, we are seeing a wide range of fascinating research and teaching work related to response to writing in both first and second language contexts. This issue is no different. In this issue, we present two research articles, two teaching articles, and a book review. In the first piece, “L2 Learners’ Engagement with Direct Written Corrective Feedback in First-Year Composition Courses,” Izabela Uscinski examines how second language learners of English engage with feedback from their college writing teachers. Uscinski draws on Svalberg’s (2009) definition of engagement, suggesting that it “encompasses not only the cognitive realm, but also affective and social.” To better understand how writers make use of written corrective feedback and whether it leads to meta-awareness and noticing of language structures, she recruited eight Chinese-L1 first-year college students taking a stretch composition course at a university in the United States. She asked the students to meet with her when they had received grammar feedback from their teachers and recorded the computer screen as they revised their essays. Playing back the recordings, she then asked the students to discuss what they had done and why.

• Background: Researchers have been working towards better understanding differences in professional disciplinary writing (e.g., Ewer & Latorre, 1969; Hu & Cao, 2015; Hyland, 2002; Hyland & Tse, 2007) for decades. Recently, research has taken important steps towards understanding disciplinary variation in student writing. Much of this research is corpus-based and focuses on lexico-grammatical features in student writing as captured in the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus and the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). The present study extends this work by analyzing lexical and cohesion differences among disciplines in MICUSP. Critically, we analyze not only linguistic differences in macro-disciplines (science and engineering), but also in micro-disciplines within these macro-disciplines (biology, physics, industrial engineering, and mechanical engineering).\n• Literature Review: Hardy and Römer (2013) used a multidimensional analysis to investigate linguistic differences across four macro-disciplines represented in MICUSP. Durrant (2014, in press) analyzed vocabulary in texts produced by student writers in the BAWE corpus by discipline and level (year) and disciplinary differences in lexical bundles. Ward (2007) examined lexical differences within micro-disciplines of a single discipline.\n• Research Questions: The research questions that guide this study are as follows:\n1. Are there significant lexical and cohesive differences between science and engineering student writing? 2. Are there significant lexical and cohesive differences between micro-disciplines within science and engineering student writing?\n• Research Methodology: To address the research questions, student-produced science and engineering texts from MICUSP were analyzed with regard to lexical sophistication and textual features of cohesion. Specifically, 22 indices of lexical sophistication calculated by the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical Sophistication (TAALES; Kyle & Crossley, 2015) and 38 cohesion indices calculated by the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Cohesion (TAACO; Crossley, Kyle, & McNamara, 2016) were used. These features were then compared both across science and engineering texts (addressing Research Question 1) and across micro-disciplines within science and engineering (biology and physics, industrial and mechanical engineering) using discriminate function analyses (DFA).\n• Results: The DFAs revealed significant linguistic differences, not only between student writing in the two macro-disciplines but also between the micro-disciplines. Differences in classification accuracy based on students’ years of study hovered at about 10%. An analysis of accuracies of classification by paper type found they were similar for larger and smaller sample sizes, providing some indication that paper type was not a confounding variable in classification accuracy.\n• Discussion: The findings provide strong support that macro-disciplinary and micro-disciplinary differences exist in student writing in these MICUSP samples and that these differences are likely not related to student level or paper type. These findings have important implications for understanding disciplinary differences. First, they confirm previous research that found the vocabulary used by different macro-disciplines to be “strikingly diverse” (Durrant, 2015), but they also show a remarkable diversity of cohesion features. The findings suggest that the common understanding of the STEM disciplines as “close” bears reconsideration in linguistic terms. Second, the lexical and cohesion differences between micro-disciplines are large enough and consistent enough to suggest that each micro-discipline can be thought of as containing a unique linguistic profile of features. Third, the differences discerned in the NLP analysis are evident at least as early as the final year of undergraduate study, suggesting that students at this level already have a solid understanding of the conventions of the disciplines of which they are aspiring to be members. Moreover, the differences are relatively homogeneous across levels, which confirms findings by Durrant (2015) but, importantly, extends these findings to include cohesion markers.\n• Conclusions: The findings from this study provide evidence that macro-disciplinary and micro-disciplinary differences at the linguistic level exist in student writing, not only in lexical use but also in text cohesion. A number of pedagogical applications of writing analytics are proposed based on the reported findings from TAALES and TAACO. Further studies using different corpora (e.g., BAWE) or purpose assembled corpora are suggested to address limitations in the size and range of text types found within MICUSP. This study also points the way toward studies of disciplinary differences using NLP approaches that capture data which goes beyond the lexical and cohesive features of text, including the use of part-of-speech tags, syntactic parsing, indices related to syntactic complexity and similarity, rhetorical features, or more advanced cohesion metrics (latent semantic analysis, latent Dirichlet allocation, Word2Vec approaches).

Background: A shift of focus has been marked in recent years in the development of automated essay scoring systems (AES) passing from merely assigning a holistic score to an essay to providing constructive feedback over it. Despite all the major advances in the domain, many objections persist concerning their credibility and readiness to replace human scoring in high-stakes writing assessments. The purpose of this study is to shed light on how to build a relatively simple AES system based on five baseline writing features. The study shows that the proposed AES system compares very well with other state-of-the-art systems despite its obvious limitations. Literature Review: In 2012, ASAP (Automated Student Assessment Prize) launched a demonstration to benchmark the performance of state-of-the-art AES systems using eight hand-graded essay datasets originating from state writing assessments. These datasets are still used today to measure the accuracy of new AES systems. Recently, Zupanc and Bosnic (2017) developed and evaluated another state-of-the-art AES system, called SAGE, which enclosed new semantic and consistency features and provided for the first time an automatic semantic feedback. SAGE’s agreement level between machine and human scores for ASAP dataset #8 (the dataset also of interest in this study) was measured and had a quadratic weighted kappa of 0.81, while it ranged for 10 other state-of-the-art systems between 0.60 and 0.73 (Chen et al., 2012; Shermis, 2014). Finally, this section discusses the limitations of AES, which come mainly from its omission to assess higher-order thinking skills that all writing constructs are ultimately designed to assess. Research Questions: The research questions that guide this study are as follows: RQ1: What is the power of the writing analytics tool’s five-variable model (spelling accuracy, grammatical accuracy, semantic similarity, connectivity, lexical diversity) to predict the holistic scores of Grade 10 narrative essays (ASAP dataset #8)? RQ2: What is the agreement level between the computer rater based on the regression model obtained in RQ1 and the human raters who scored the 723 narrative essays written by Grade 10 students (ASAP dataset #8)? Methodology: ASAP dataset #8 was used to train the predictive model of the writing analytics tool introduced in this study. Each essay was graded by two teachers. In case of disagreement between the two raters, the scoring was resolved by a third rater. Basically, essay scores were the weighted sums of four rubric scores. A multiple linear regression analysis was conducted to determine the extent to which a five-variable model (selected from a set of 86 writing features) was effective to predict essay scores. Results: The regression model in this study accounted for 57% of the essay score variability. The correlation (Pearson), the percentage of perfect matches, the percentage of adjacent matches (±2), and the quadratic weighted kappa between the resolved scores and predicted essay scores were 0.76, 10%, 49%, and 0.73, respectively. The results were measured on an integer scale of resolved essay scores between 10-60. Discussion: When measuring the accuracy of an AES system, it is important to take into account several metrics to better understand how predicted essay scores are distributed along the distribution of human scores. Using average ranking over correlation, exact/adjacent agreement, quadratic weighted kappa, and distributional characteristics such as standard deviation and mean, this study’s regression model ranks 4th out of 10 AES systems. Despite its relatively good rank, the predictions of the proposed AES system remain imprecise and do not even look optimal to identify poor-quality essays (binary condition) smaller than or equal to a 65% threshold (71% precision and 92% recall). Conclusions: This study sheds light on the implementation process and the evaluation of a new simple AES system comparable to the state of the art and reveals that the generally obscure state-of-the-art AES system is most likely concerned only with shallow assessment of text production features. Consequently, the authors advocate greater transparency in the development and publication of AES systems. In addition, the relationship between the explanation of essay score variability and the inter-rater agreement level should be further investigated to better represent the changes in terms of level of agreement when a new variable is added to a regression model. This study should also be replicated at a larger scale in several different writing settings for more robust results.

Background: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a mental health disorder. People diagnosed with ADHD are often inattentive (have difficulty focusing on a task for a considerable period), overly impulsive (make rash decisions), and are hyperactive (move excessively, often at inappropriate times). ADHD is often diagnosed through psychiatric assessments with additional input from physical/neurological evaluations. Written Language Disorder (WLD) is a learning disorder. People diagnosed with WLD often make multiple spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes, have sentences that lack cohesion and topic flow, and have trouble completing written assignments. Typically, WLD is also diagnosed through psychological educational assessments with additional input from physical/neurological evaluation. Literature Review: Previous research has shown a link between ADHD and writing difficulties. Students with ADHD have an increased likelihood of having writing difficulties, and rarely is there a presence of writing difficulties without ADHD or another mental health disorder. However, the presence of writing difficulties does not necessarily indicate the presence of a WLD. There are other physical and behavioral factors of ADHD that can contribute to a student having a WLD as well. Therefore, a statistical association between these factors (in conjunction with written performance) and WLD must first be established. Research Question: To determine the statistical association between WLD and physical and behavioral aspects of ADHD that indicate writing difficulties, this research reviewed methodologies from the literature pertaining to contemporary diagnoses of writing difficulties in ADHD students, and reveal diagnostic methods that explicitly associate the presence of WLD with these writing difficulties among students with ADHD. The results demonstrate the association between writing difficulties and WLD as it pertains to ADHD students using an integrated computational model employed on data from a systematic review. These results will be validated in a future study that will employ the integrated computational model to measure WLD among students with ADHD. Methodology: To measure the association of WLD among students with ADHD, the authors created a novel computational model that integrates the outcomes of common screening methods for WLD (physical questionnaire, behavioral questionnaire, and written performance tasks) with common screening methods for ADHD (physical questionnaire, behavioral questionnaire, adult self-reporting scales, and reaction-based continuous performance tasks (CPTs)). The outcomes of these screening methods were fed into an artificial neural network (ANN ) first, to ‘artificially learn’ about measuring the prevalence of WLD among ADHD students and second, to adjust the prevalence value based on information from different screening methods. This can be considered as the priming of the ANN. The ANN model was then tested with data from previous studies about ADHD students who had writing difficulties. The ANN model was also tested with data from students without ADHD or WLD, to serve as control. Results: The results show that physical, behavioral, and written performance attributes of ADHD students have a high correlation with WLD (r = 0.72 to 0.80) in comparison to control students (r = 0.30 to 0.20), substantiating the link between WLD and ADHD. It should be noted that due to lack of female participation, most studies in the literature only employed and reported on the relationship between WLD and ADHD for male participants. Discussion and Conclusion: By testing ADHD students and control students against the WLD criteria, the study shows a strong correlation between WLD and ADHD. There are limitations to the results’ accuracy in terms of a) sample size (average n=88, mean age = 19, 8 studies used for a meta-analysis), b) analysis (original study reviewing ADHD factors first, WLD factors second), and c) causation (the study only reviews prevalence of WLD in ADHD students, not causation). A clinical trial will validate the data and address some of these limitations in a future phase of the research. A computational causal model will be introduced in the discussion portion to illustrate how causation between writing metrics and WLD as it pertains to ADHD can be achieved. These results open the door to advancing pedagogical techniques in education, where students afflicted with ADHD and/or WLD could not only receive assistance for the behavioral aspects of their disorder, but also expect assistance for the learning aspects of their disorder, empowering them to succeed in their studies.

As a pedagogical tool, “style” in writing center lore has been cast as a lower-order concern. This marginalization stems not only from the difficulty of defining the word itself, but also from a persistent belief that “style” exists in a vacuum separate from “content,” “development,” and grammar, thus being of secondary importance to tutors and administrators. In this article, Edward Santos Garza challenges this clinical framework, arguing that style, a vital, permeating force, has much to offer those in writing center work. He positions style as a tool to help WC visitors more fully discuss, assess, and strengthen themselves as writers. Asserting that style is equally valuable for thinking about writing with regard to identity, Garza envisions how WC staff could productively foreground it in sessions and training.

From 2012 to 2015, the online grammar program Grammarly was claimed to complement writing center services by 1. increasing student access to writing support; and 2. addressing sentence-level issues, such as grammar. To test if Grammarly could close these two gaps in writing center services, this article revisits the results of a Spring 2014 study that compared Grammarly' s comment cards to the written feedback of 10 asynchronous online consultants. The results showed that both Gram-marly and some consultants strayed from effective practices regarding limiting feedback, avoiding technical language, and providing accurate information about grammatical structure. However, the consultants' weaknesses could be addressed with enhanced or focused training, and their strengths allowed for important learning opportunities that enable student access to information across mediums and help students establish connections between their sentences and the larger whole. This article concludes that each writing center should consider their own way of closing these gaps and offers suggestions for multiple consultation genres, new services, and strategies for sentence-level concerns.

Many communication instructors make allowances for grammatical error in nonnative English speakers’ writing, but do businesspeople do the same? We asked 169 businesspeople to comment on three versions of an email with different types of errors. We found that businesspeople do make allowances for errors made by nonnative English speakers, perceiving these errors as less bothersome than those made by native speakers. We also found that businesspeople perceive pragmatic errors of politeness and tone as even more bothersome than grammatical error—a finding we share with our students to persuade them of the importance of polite and professional email correspondence.

Although scholars have historically minimized the relationship between medieval grammatical and rhetorical traditions and Chaucer's poetics, Proserpina's angry speech in the Merchant's Tale represents the intersection of medieval classroom grammar exercises, Geoffrey of Vinsauf's theory of delivery, and poetics. Proserpina's angry speech reveals that her rhetoric is calculated to subvert the masculine power structures that surround her. Such a focus on Chaucer's depiction of women's persuasive tactics helps to highlight Chaucer's deep engagement with rhetoric beginning in the 1380's. Moreover, this investigation asks for increased attention to the overlap between classroom grammatical traditions, rhetorical theory, and medieval poetics.

Despite the growing evidence of the language and literacy benefits of collaborative discussions for English language learners, the factors contributing to productive discussions that promote ELLs’ positive language outcomes are less understood. This study examined the influence of teacher talk, students’ initial language and literacy skills, and home language backgrounds on the discussion proficiency of four groups participating in eight peer-led literature discussions, called collaborative reasoning (CR), in two 5th-grade classrooms serving mainly Spanish-speaking ELLs. Levels of discussion proficiency were determined using a holistic rating approach and utterance-by utterance coding of discourse features. Teachers’ scaffolding moves were coded. Students’ pre- and post-intervention language and literacy skills and home language backgrounds were assessed. Results showed greater group variation in discussion proficiency in the mainstream class than in the bilingual class. The two teachers differed in their ways of facilitating CR discussions. Group discussion proficiency was associated with oral English skills (sentence grammar) and reading comprehension, as well as student English language use at home and parental assistance with homework. The talk volume and indicators of high-level comprehension such as articulating and responding to alternative perspectives, elaborations, extratextual connections, and uses of textual evidence were associated with post-intervention language and literacy outcomes. These findings contribute to the understanding of sources of variations in discussion proficiency among groups composed predominantly of ELLs and provide implications for teacher scaffolding strategies to facilitate ELLs’ learning and participation in classroom discussions.

Although scholars have historically minimized the relationship between medieval grammatical and rhetorical traditions and Chaucer’s poetics, Proserpina’s angry speech in the Merchant’s Tale represents the intersection of medieval classroom grammar exercises, Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s theory of delivery, and poetics. Proserpina’s angry speech reveals that her rhetoric is calculated to subvert the masculine power structures that surround her. Such a focus on Chaucer’s depiction of women’s persuasive tactics helps to highlight Chaucer’s deep engagement with rhetoric beginning in the 1380’s. Moreover, this investigation asks for increased attention to the overlap between classroom grammatical traditions, rhetorical theory, and medieval poetics.

This article presents findings of a 2014 survey of 72 U.S. employers asking: Which oral communication skills are most utilized daily by new hires? Which oral skills are most important to company success? The study utilized Qualtrics to administer a mixed-methods, 12-question survey to employers of various sizes and across various industries. Findings show that employers rank (a) proper grammar use, (b) team communication, (c) ability to engage in conversation, (d) meeting participation, and (e) ability to speak well using the telephone as the most valued oral competencies for new hires as a factor in company success.

This study investigates Grade 12 students’ global and local strategies for writing from the Internet. Analysis of screen captures, think-aloud protocols, and interviews showed two global writing strategies: 1) Students created mediating planning documents; they alternated between researching online and creating mediating planning documents, then drafted a text, and then revised. 2) Students created no (or almost no) mediating documents; they wrote directly from the source documents, alternating frequently between researching, drafting, and revising. Each global strategy comprised several sub-ordinate strategies (e.g., search using a combination of content and rhetorical keywords; take hard copy notes; draft a text out of the sequence in which it appears in the final text; use automatic spelling and grammar checkers to guide review). Some of these strategies are similar to those used in print-based writing from sources. However, using the Internet also resulted in new researching and writing strategies. We argue that writers created task environments and used strategies that maximized the affordances of the Internet, electronic writing medium, and internal cognition, and minimized their constraints. This work extends classical cognitive work on writing as well as more recent work on writing from sources.

The purpose of this study was to examine how six middle-school students used Automated Essay Evaluation (AEE) technology to revise their writing. Students in a combined 7th and 8th grade Literacy class at one school participated in two in-depth think alouds and semi-structured interviews as they used AEE technology to revise their writing on two separate writing tasks. Constant-comparative analysis of data, including think alouds, semi-structured interviews, and student writing along with a separate quantitative analysis of student revisions revealed themes in three areas: (a) student use of AEE feedback to make revisions; (b) student motivation to revise their writing when using AEE technology; (c) and student understanding and application of AEE feedback during revision. Findings indicated that students who received low scores used AEE feedback to prompt non-surface revisions whereas students with high scores did not. Further, students who used AEE feedback to prompt non-surface revisions made more overall non-surface revisions, revised for different reasons, made more t-unit level revisions, and had more revisions rated as major successes than students who did not use the feedback. Students who used the AEE feedback, MY Editor, were often confused by the grammar and punctuation feedback and had a low success rate using it. However, students were more successful with the spell checker only feedback. In addition, findings show that students were motivated to revise because of the numerical scores the technology assigned their writing. Moreover, knowledge that they would receive a score prompted students to do extensive revising prior to submitting their writing for scoring. Finally, student understanding of the AEE feedback was varied. Implications for classroom use of AEE technology and directions for future research are discussed.

Writing in a second language, especially using new technologies, is fraught with difficulties for most students. There are two main challenges, firstly, how can students move from their understanding of the mechanical aspects of texts (good sentence structure and appropriate lexis) to deal with issues of how to construct texts that go beyond the basics, for instance drawing upon multiple modes of expression, and secondly, how can students use their knowledge about new technologies to help them create texts? This paper examines the collaborative processes English for Science students go through when constructing a scientific text for a popular audience, here, a digital video scientific documentary. Undergraduate students had to work in groups to write the text for a digital story based on an experiment they had undertaken. As part of the process these students had to prepare a script which was then recorded, either speaking directly to the camera, or as a voice over onto the video to complement their video images. Based on examples from the students’ generated data: Facebook, WhatsApp posts and scripts, we see that the end product was rich and informative. It is maintained that a collaborative approach using new technologies to writing such popular scientific texts engages the students with their work and that, when given the opportunity, they learn from each other as much as from their teacher.

This article outlines a student-centered, ‘hands-on’ approach to the teaching of writing at university level through first discovering and then creating the features of written texts in three dimensions: microtextual (lexico-grammar), macrotextual (rhetoric), and extratextual (context). The ‘3-D’ approach has been designed for novice writers, offering a practical, step-by-step procedure to prepare them to write in specific disciplines and for specific purposes. Though usable with other audiences, the sample material included here is especially appropriate for second-language writers and will be of particular interest to students of science. While the approach is consistent with Systemic-Functional and ESP orientations to text, as contrasted with most ESP pedagogy – especially that geared to students in sciences – the 3-D approach gives particular attention to affect, writer–reader interaction, and shared context. The approach, which starts from analysis of texts and then moves to writing of texts, is first described and then illustrated using several short popular science texts about insects and birds. These texts exemplify lexico-grammatical and rhetorical features of scientific texts while also illustrating other purposes which a writer may seek to fulfill as well as the underlying assumptions and author biases that might exist even in texts which appear to be purely descriptive or ‘objective’. The texts and analyses provided are intended for classroom use to train students in the approach, supplemented by a step by step guide for students to follow. Through the activities provided for the sample texts, students develop awareness of the properties of texts and how these can be discovered through analysis and then written into their own texts.

It is important to begin this essay with a note about language. The international scope of Quintilian studies is evidenced by the number of European languages used to discuss him—German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, as well as English. Two major recent collections of studies about Quintilian are written mainly in continental languages. The larger is the three-volume Quintiliano: Historia y Actualidad de la Retórica edited by Tomás Albaladejo, Emilio del Río, and José Antonio Caballero López; it includes 123 essays mostly in Spanish but with some French and English. The work stems from an international conference held in Madrid and in Calahorra, Spain (Quintilian’s birthplace) to commemorate the 1900th anniversary of the publication of the Institutio Oratoria. Another collection is Quintilien: ancien et moderne (2012), edited by Perrine-Ferdinand Galand, Carlos Lévy and Wim Verbaal, with thirty-one essays in French. These are largely inaccessible to monophone English speakers, as are some important individual studies such as Gualtiero Calboli, Quintiliano y su Escuela; Otto Seel, Quintilian: oder, die kunst des Redners und Schweigens; or Jean Cousin, Récherches sur Quintilien.The reader of this essay, then, should be aware that the English works discussed here are but a small part of a wider international undertaking. The numbers, too, are worth noting. For example, the online Quintilian bibliography by Thorsten Burkard of Kiel University in Germany lists 847 items arranged in fourteen subject sections, while the World Catalog displays 5,179 records (of which 1,896 are in English) and the Melvyl search engine for University of California libraries finds 1,125 Quintilian entries in that system alone. The first (and only) bibliography of Quintilian published in America, in 1981, was that of Keith V. Erickson in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, listing nearly 800 books and articles alphabetized by author. Thus what we discuss here is in a sense only the tip of a scholarly iceberg.The best single short introduction to Quintilian is an essay by Jorge Fernández López, “Quintilian as Rhetorician and Teacher,” in A Companion to Roman Rhetoric. Fernández López presents a balanced view of what Quintilian has in mind in his Institutio Oratoria, with sections on biography, the meaning and structure of the Institutio, early education, the system of rhetoric, style, the orator in action, and the author’s approach to rhetoric and morals.One of the most important recent contributions to making Quintilian text accessible was the publication in 2001 of Donald A. Russell’s edition and translation of his Institutio Oratoria in a five-volume Loeb Classical Library set. The previous Loeb translation was by H. E. Butler in 1921–22 in four volumes. Russell’s smooth translation and more extensive notes make his work superior to that of Butler. Russell makes adroit use of sentence variety and punctuation to make his translation more readable than Butler’s, which tends to follow more literally Quintilian’s often periodic style with its long multi-clausal sentences. Also, Butler had provided only two short indices of “Names and Words” in the Institutio, with comparatively few notes to the text itself, while Russell supplies copious notes to virtually every page of the text; in addition he completes the whole set at the end of Volume Five with an “Index of Proper Names,” and Indexes to Books 1–12 which include a 33-page “General Index.” an “Index to Rhetorical and Grammatical Terms,” and an “Index of Authors and Passages Quoted.” Moreover, Russell provides an introduction to each of the twelve books that includes a summary of that book’s contents—a valuable resource for the reader struggling to cope with the sheer magnitude of the Institutio. It is the addition of these new notes and the 100 pages of indexes at the end that make the Russell longer than the Butler, but the value to the reader makes it worthwhile.Also new is the appearance of the first one-volume translation of the Institutio, a print version of the translation by John Selby Watson (1856) as revised and edited online by Lee Honeycutt (2007) and edited for print by Honeycutt and Curtis Dozier in 2015. The 686-page paperback is available for purchase under the title Quintilian: Institutes of Oratory, or, Education of an Orator, and is also available online. The volume includes Watson’s own “Preface” and “Life of Quintilian,” together with a twenty-five page summary of the Institutio, by book and chapter, keyed to the page numbers of the translation. (These chapter headings are then repeated throughout the volume.) There are none of Watson’s notes to the translation, Honeycutt explains, because they were omitted to save space for fitting it into the one volume; he recommends that the reader consult Russell’s notes. Despite that problem, this one-volume translation may be useful to readers for its portability and low cost compared to the five-volume Loeb Library translation of Russell.Tobias Reinhardt and Michael Winterbottom have edited Quintilian Institutio Oratoria Book 2. This volume includes not only the Latin text of Book 2 (1–34) but also an informative 50-page “Introduction” which examines Quintilian’s teaching methods, his concept of rhetoric, and his strategies in presenting his ideas. But the vast majority of the volume (35–394) offers meticulous commentaries on the 21 chapters of Book Two. A short prose summary introduces each chapter; then the editors painstakingly examine key Latin words and phrases in the text. Many of these observations are highly technical and demand some knowledge of Latin or Greek. On the other hand, many others may be illuminating to a general reader, as in the opening of chapter 11 (175–176), where the editors discuss Quintilian’s response to those who think rhetorical precepts are not necessary. Book 2 is an important one in the Institutio, for in it Quintilian ends his formal exposition of early education and begins his discussion of rhetoric.Another recent reprinting, of Book 10 of the Institutio, may seem at first glance to be of interest only to skilled classical scholars. This is William Peterson, Quintilian: Institutionis Oratoriae; Liber Decimus, originally published 1891, but now edited by Giles Lauren with a “Foreword” by James J. Murphy. It includes the Latin text of Book 10 with extensive notes mostly in English, with a full summary of the book (1–12), a useful short chapter on Quintilian’s literary criticism, and a longer one on his use of language with numerous examples in both English and Latin. Even the non-Latinate reader may find things to learn in this volume. Peterson was a child prodigy—he wrote this 290-page book at age 24—who later went on to become Principal of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.The most recent addition to the availability of Quintilian’s work is Quintilian on the Teaching of Speaking and Writing: Translations from Books One, Two and Ten of the Institutio Oratoria, second edition, edited by James J. Murphy and Cleve Weise. Part One of the introduction discusses Quintilian’s teaching methods, including verification from modern cognitive science of his views on habit (hexis), together with some possibilities for modern applications of his principles; also Part Two presents four sets of Quintilian-based exercises designed to encourage close reading of the three translations which follow.The best single book on Quintilian, George A. Kennedy’s Quintilian, was published in 1969 by Twayne Publishers as part of their World Author series but has long been out of print. It has now reappeared in a revised edition as Kennedy, Quintilian: A Roman Educator and His Quest for the Perfect Orator. This slim (117 pages) volume is divided into eight chapters, each of which begins with the identification of “important sources and special studies at the beginning of each chapter rather than combining all bibliography in a single alphabetical list at the end of the book. This avoids the use of footnotes …” (1). While the book is ostensibly divided into sections representing Quintilian’s background, educational plan, rhetoric, and the “good man” concept in Book 12, what Kennedy actually presents is a thorough summary of the Institutio coupled with a far-ranging personal critique not only of the Institutio but of the man himself. He treats both Quintilian’s aspirations and what he views as his faults, and concludes the book with a discussion of Cornelius Tacitus (55?–117 CE) and the view that the Institutio had changed nothing in Rome. But Kennedy, author of so many books on classical rhetoric and its history, is so steeped in Roman culture that he writes easily about complex events; for example his portrayal of Quintilian’s possible reasons for retirement and the composition of the Institutio (22–28) reads almost like a novel. Anyone, expert or beginner, can profit from Kennedy’s observations.(Editor’s note: the following survey does not attempt to list every recent reference to Quintilian, or every entry for him in handbooks or encyclopedias. Nor does it follow every use in textbooks where his doctrines are mingled with others, as for example in the successive editions of works like Corbett and Connors, Classical Rhetoric and the Modern Student, and Crowley and Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. The emphasis here instead is on books and articles which elucidate his text or lay out directions for future research.)A useful place to start is with three collections of essays, two of which contain a mixture of languages but do offer some valuable English contributions. The first one, already mentioned, is the massive three-volume Quintiliano (1998) edited by Tomás Albaladejo et al. Eleven of its 131 essays are in English, with contributions by Adams, Albaladejo, Cockcroft, Hallsall, Harsting, Hatch, Kennedy, Murphy, Willbanks, Winterbottom, and Woods. Its 1561 pages are continuously paginated.Another, smaller gathering presents twelve essays in two special issues of Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric in 1995, under the title “The Institutio Oratoria after 1900 years.” Six of the essays are in English, by Cranz, Fantham, France, Kraus, Sussman, and Ward.The volume Quintilian and the Law: The Art of Persuasion in Law and Politics (2003), edited by Olga Tellegen-Couperus, offers 25 essays, all of them in English, covering a wider range of subjects than the title might indicate. The book stems from a conference held at Tilburg in The Netherlands in 2001 convened by the Willem Witteveen and the editor “to try and assess [sic] Quintilian’s significance for students and practitioners of the art of persuasion in antiquity and in modern times” (Preface). The authors of six chapters do cover law and jurisprudence: Lewis, Robinson, Rossi, Tellegen, Tellegen-Couperus, and Witteveen. Another five focus on the courtroom and persuasion of judges: Henket, Katula, Martín, Mastrorosa, and Tellegen-Couperus in a second essay. Two deal with reading and writing in Book 10: Murphy and Taekema. The remainder discuss a variety of topics, including emotion, language, argument, and figures. In sum, this collection should prove valuable even to readers not primarily interested in law.The first observation to be made about current research is that, with the possible exception of Kennedy’s Quintilian, there is no book-length analytic study of Quintilian in English. But while Kennedy’s charming introduction to Quintilian does provide biographical information together with a running summary of the Institutio Oratoria, it is not intended as a thorough exploration of the many issues in this complex work. It is of course not surprising that we lack such a book, given the knowledges required—rhetoricians and students of education often lack sophisticated knowledge of ancient Roman culture, while classicists sometimes fail to appreciate the nuances of Quintilian’s rhetoric and pedagogy.Understandably, then, the overwhelming majority of articles and book chapters published since 1990 deal with particular, comparatively small segments of the Quintilian corpus. They present such a kaleidoscopic array that it seems best to group them by subject areas.The largest number of these (seventeen to be exact) discuss the later history of the Institutio Oratoria, its “reception” or “influence” in various times and places. They cover a wide range of topics: Renaissance learning (Classen); Saint Jerome (Davis “Culture”); Rousseau (France); Hugh Blair (Halloran; Hatch); the nineteenth century (Johnson); women in the Renaissance (Klink); Czech thought (Kraus); Milton and Ramus (Lares); Italian Renaissance (Monfasani); the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Murphy “Quintilian’s Influence”); Obadiah Walker (O’Rourke); eloquence in Quintilian’s time (Osgood); early modern role models (Rossi); and the Middle Ages (Ward; Woods).Teaching and its psychology interest another seventeen of the authors: Bloomer (“Schooling,” “Quintilian”); Brand et al.; Briggs; Connelly; Corbeill; Fantham (“The Concept of Nature”); Furse; Ker; Montefusco; Morgan (Literate Education); Murphy (“The Key Role of Habit,” “Quintilian’s Advice,” “Roman Writing Instruction”); Richlin; Too; Van Elst and Woners; Woods.Some of Quintilian’s specific teaching methods are treated: declamation (Breij; Friend; Kasper; Kennedy “Roman Declamation”; Mendelson “Declamation”; Sussman; Wiese); Progymnasmata (Fleming; Henderson; Kennedy, Progymnasmata; Webb); and imitation (Harsting; Taoka; Terrill).The application of Quintilian’s principles to modern education is the subject for six authors: Bourelle; Corbett and Connors; Crowley and Hawhee; Kasper.Another five works discuss the Institutio Oratoria itself: Adams; Celentano; López “The Concept”); and Murphy, Katula and Hoppman.Law attracts another five: Lewis; Martín; Robinson, Tellegen; Tellegen-Couperus (Quintilian and the Law).Emotion is the subject of three essays: Cockcoft; Katula (“Emotion”; Leigh.Language, writing, and style attract another eight authors: Chico-Rico; Craig; Davis (“Quintilian on Writing”); d’Esperey; Lausberg; Murphy (“Roman Writing Instruction”); Tellegen-Couperus (“Style and Law”); Wooten.Not surprisingly, there is interest in the subject of rhetoric in eight works: Albaladejo, Gunderson (“The Rhetoric”); Heath; Kennedy, (“Rhetoric,” A New History, “Peripatetic Rhetoric”); Roochnik; Wulfing.Quintilian as a person, including his vir bonus concept, draws the attention of Cranz; Halsall; Kennedy (Quintilian); Lanham; Logie; Walzer (Quintilian’s).One final note is to remark on the appearance of four Ph.D. dissertations in this array of studies (Furse; Ker; Klink; Wiese) together with two M.A. theses (Francoz; O’Rourke). Doctoral dissertations can be located fairly easily through normal bibliographic channels, but the identification of master’s theses is much more difficult. In any case, it is hoped that their appearance marks faculty interest in Quintilian in their respective institutions.

216 RHETORICA del fratello di Guizzardo, i Flores veritatis gramatice di Bertoluccio (sopra ricordato), conservata anche in altri due manoscritti (e attribuita a Gentile da Cingoli in un altro ms.). Lo studio di quest'opera che, secondo il giudizio di Gian Carlo Alessio, è "un manuale costruito coi modelli della grammatica speculativa", sarebbe molto intéressante perché potrebbe costituire il legame tra la tradizione di riflessione grammaticale, importata probabilmente tra i maestri delle arti e medicina di Bologna da Gentile da Cingoli (il maestro di Angelo di Arezzo), e la tradizione di insegnamento della grammatica e della retorica (dictamen) di ámbito giuridico-notarile che convivevano a Bologna, non sempre in buoni rapporti. COSTANTINO MARMO, BOLOGNA Matthew Kempshall, Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400-1500, Manchester University Press, 2012, x + 627 pp. ISBN 9780719070310 Peter Van Nuffelen, Orosius and the Rhetoric of History, Oxford University Press, 2012, viii + 252 pp. ISBN 9780199655274 In recent years, scholarly attitudes towards writers of history in the late antique and medieval period have undergone a fundamental series of trans­ formations. It is no longer sufficient to describe these individuals as mere imi­ tators of a glorious classical historiographical tradition, using tools that they only barely understood with limited success. Nor can they be unreflectively dismissed simply as polemicists and moralizers, subject to the particular pressures that attended an overly-literal reception of Biblical themes and models. The two books under review here add further fuel to a revisionist reading of medieval historiography by focusing upon the ways in which authors could strategically utilize techniques of argumentation and presenta­ tion drawn from the training in rhetoric and grammar that underpinned the literary culture of the period. Matthew Kempshall's Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400-1500 is a magisterial, synthetic introduction to the subject, aimed principally at students and scholars new to the field and encompassing some 550 pages of elegantly written, exhaustively supported argumentation. In his Orosius and the Rhetoric ofHistory, meanwhile, Peter Van Nuffelen offers a collection of carefully drawn interpretative vignettes which seek to engage scholars of both historiography and Christian literature of the period, and, in the process, to redirect the focus of Orosian scholarship by placing him within the context of secular, as well as Christian, historiography of the fifth and sixth centuries. Both projects are, therefore, explicitly rehabilitative in nature: Kempshall's to demonstrate that medieval historiography was neither crude nor credulous nor conceptually unsophisticated" (536), and Van Nuffelen's to deliver Orosius from the accusation that he was an unimaginative, unintelligent theologian who fundamentally misunderstood the works of his patron, Augustine of Reviews 217 Hippo. Both authors go about their projects by emphasizing the close and enduring relationship between the writing of history and the practices, concerns, and techniques of classical rhetoric. In particular, both acknowledge and build upon existing arguments about the extensive and substantial influ­ ence of manuals of rhetoric (particularly Cicero, Quintilian, and the pseudoCiceronian Rhetonoi iid Hei'eniiiimi) on the education that authors of the period received. For Kempshall, the pervasiveness of classical rhetoric in medieval thought and literature should not be understood as a black mark against the veracity, reliability, or integrity of practitioners of the period. On the contrary, the principles of deliberative, judicial, and demonstrative rhetoric provided the writers of history with the tools that thev needed in order to fulfill the tripartite objective of history: to teach, to move, and to please. After first outlining the immense diversity of texts that are collected together under the rubric of medi­ eval historiography and the fundamental forms and objectives of the three types of classical rhetoric that authors of those texts might be expected to be familiar with, Kempshall proceeds to explore in detail the principles and tech­ niques of classical rhetoric, and the texts and contexts in which they can be found in historical writing of the period. In the process, he also questions and begins upon a deconstruction of the tendency to identify the 12th and 15th centuries as w atershed moments in the history of medieval historiographv . While he agrees that the intellectual and cultural developments of those centuries do mark significant points in the dev elopment of medieval...

This useful, clearly written, and highly satisfying book is Laurent Pernot’s second major English-language contribution to rhetorical scholarship, after his 2005 Rhetoric in Antiquity (originally La rhétorique dans l’antiquité in 2000). Here Pernot builds on work from his earlier career, in particular his 1993 La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-romain.The point of departure, in Chapter One, is the striking proliferation of epideictic genres in later antiquity—or, at least, the number of genres recognized as “epideictic” by rhetoricians, rhetors, and their audiences. Whereas Aristotle has a limited notion of the epideictic “genus,” by Menander Rhetor’s time, roughly the late third century, the category has evolved to include a wide range of genres, each with its own distinct (if overlapping) inventional topoi. The list includes the traditional funeral speech (epitaphios logos) and the festival speech (panēgyrikos logos) as well as various kinds of encomia in praise of individuals, cities, harbors, aqueducts, and so on. There is also the imperial oration, the birthday speech, the nuptial speech delivered outside the bedroom door, the welcome-speech to an arriving official as he stepped ashore, and the farewell speech when he left. There were also forms of speech that took the functions of ancient poetry, such as the victory-speech (the epinikios logos), a prose equivalent to Pindar’s odes for victorious athletes, or Aelius Aristides’ “hymns” and “monodies” in prose (see Regarding Sarapis). At the same time a number of ancient, poetic forms persisted, such as hymns to the gods and mythic narratives (e.g., the Dionysiaca, a 48-book epic poem about the god’s conquest of India), and these were called “epideictic” too.And so on again. I have not yet even mentioned Hermogenes of Tarsus’ classification of all poetry, history, and philosophy as “pure panegyric,” i.e., as epideictic rhetoric (On Types of Style 2.12). Further, as Pernot suggests in Chapter Three (97–99), encomiastic or parainetic praise might function as an important element in practical deliberative and judicial discourse, and even as a kind of deliberative discourse in itself. (Parainesis praises ethical virtues and exhorts the listener to observe them, as in Isocrates’ To Nicocles.) While Pernot may not be willing to go that far, we do find confirmation in Byzantine lists of model texts for imitation, in which Plutarch’s Moralia (Ta Ēthika) stand as examples of the “deliberative” genre.Pernot’s basic point in Chapter One is that the “rise of epideictic” to ascendency in later antiquity was an “irresistible” and “unstoppable” phenomenon (27) that the usual histories of rhetoric have mostly failed to understand. But if we set aside the usual assumption that epideictic is “mere” display, epideictic proves itself more creative and more vital—and more pragmatically consequential—than we tend to think.Pernot addresses this challenge in two main ways. The first is to define epideictic more precisely—to specify what is not epideictic. If, for example, we follow Aristotle’s audience-subject-time definition of the three (why three?) “genres” of rhetoric, it appears that there are two fairly specific kinds of practical civic speech addressed to judges in a well-defined civic space (a court of law, a council-hall, a public assembly), and besides these a third and vaguer kind, epideictic, which is not addressed to judges but to theōroi, “observers/spectators.” The audiences of the two practical genres (jurymen, councilors) are empowered to issue legally binding decrees (Socrates is guilty; send reinforcements to the expedition in Sicily). The theōros of epideictic, in contrast, is not empowered to issue binding judgments, but is concerned with observing a display (epideixis) of praise or blame in the present moment. Epideictic is defined in terms of lack.The argument would take too long to work out here, but the ultimate effect of that definition is to assign all speech not specifically addressed to judges in some sort of court or council-hall to epideictic. All speech, after all, implicitly blames and praises in some way. If you refute my argument you “blame” its defective reasoning; if you defend and confirm it, you “praise” the quality of its undeniable proofs. Even at the level of word choice, to state the obvious, every choice implies some evaluative attitude toward what is named, and thus implicitly blames or praises it. So we have a three-part classification of rhetorical genres consisting of two specific kinds of speeches (judicial and deliberative) and all other human language use (epideictic).Pernot’s basic remedy is to limit the notion of epideictic to encomiastic discourse: a more or less determinate genre (as codified, for example, in ancient progymnasmata manuals) whose evolution can be traced from a handful of early exemplars to the profusion we see later. This move has the virtue of keeping epideictic within the category of civic discourse. The encomium, the panegyric, and their derivatives are normally performed in some sort of sanctioned civic space or event, such as a state funeral, a religious festival, a celebratory homecoming for a victorious athlete, and so on, by a person specially commissioned for the job and considered worthy of it. The speech then worked to forge or refresh a communion of shared belief by eliciting approval for the praise bestowed on the honoree—a rhetorical effect that often was more important than the honoree’s real character (see Leslie Kurke’s The Traffic in Praise).The second approach to the “unstoppable” rise of epideictic in later antiquity is mostly an extension of the first. We need to consider the socio-political structure of the Greco-Roman world, and the occasions and spaces it provided for public speech, in order to understand the proliferation of encomiastic genres. As I have argued elsewhere, we cannot explain the rise of epideictic merely by invoking the supposed “decay” of judicial and symbouleutic rhetoric. In fact, in every major town and city in the Roman Empire there were courts of law and council-halls, and these continued to be busy (if confined to local matters and restrained by procedural regulations and written law). To understand the rise of epideictic/encomiastic rhetoric, we must understand the role it played in sustaining the sense of a common culture shared by the far-flung, multiethnic elites that ran the Roman Empire (which one could argue was more like a multinational corporation than a modern state). From this perspective, the encomiastic culture of epideictic very effectively performed the role attributed in Cicero’s De Oratore to the “perfect orator.”Two quick remarks. One: identifying epideictic with civic encomia has many virtues, as noted above, but I wonder what happens to, for example, Hermogenes’ treatment of poetry, history, and philosophy as “pure” epideictic (panegyric)—as opposed to “practical” (civic) epideictic. These “pure” (meaning unmixed) types can be seen as also participating in praise and blame, and as forging or undermining different kinds of cultural communion. Two: the notion of sustaining a common culture among the Roman Empire’s administrative class—some of whom were Syrians, Greeks, North Africans, and so on—is very appealing, but I suspect that some readers will want to hear more about the less-irenic tensions in Greco-Roman culture and what role Hermogenes’ “pure epideictic” genres played in ideological insurgencies.From here I will be very brief. My water-clock has just about run out.Chapter Two, “The Grammar of Praise,” details the lists of topoi specified for different types of epideictic, offers a brief typology of speeches, and makes a list of characteristic figures (apostrophe, hyperbole, and comparative metaphor). Much of this will not be news for anyone familiar with Menander Rhetor, but it will be an excellent introduction for those who are not. The core argument, regarding epideictic as an instrument of communion, will be interesting to all.Chapter Three, “Why Epideictic Rhetoric?” takes on the traditional suspicion of epideictic as empty flattery and/or inconsequential display. Most of the arguments of this chapter are reflected in the paragraphs above: epideictic rhetoric has persuasory functions that are socially and politically consequential. Perhaps what is most interesting in this chapter is Pernot’s account of the circumstances of epideictic performance in antiquity and, especially, his estimates of the length of epideictic speeches (82): for example, Aelius Aristide’s Regarding Rome takes about one hour to deliver; imperial panegyrics took 30 minutes. (The addressees, after all, were busy people.) This chapter is worth the whole book.Chapter Four, “New Approaches in Epideictic,” suggests directions for future research. These include an “anthropological” application of speech-act theory to the performative and ceremonial aspects of epideictic discourse, and the uses of silence and “veiled” discourse to communicate what might be dangerous to say, or to promote subversive “dissent and denunciation” instead of “communion.” This will, I suspect, be the preferred direction of many readers. Pernot, however, both acknowledges that preference and calls for “a little more patience” with epideictic as an irenic and utopian instrument of communion (99–100). It may not be a bad idea to consider it that way first.

The debate over the efficacy of written teacher comments has raised a variety of questions for consideration by both researchers and practitioners. Teachers can use written comments, in Vygotsky’s (1978) framework, to scaffold the development of student writing. By reflecting on his or her own commenting process, a teacher can assess and modify his or her comments as well as the method by which the comments are delivered. This study examines how four second-language (L2) students responded to comments on a series of three papers. The results show that students overwhelmingly followed the strategy training given during class on how to respond to teacher’s comments; however, the strategies used to make changes did not always result in a positive revision. While students believed they followed the teacher’s suggestions, they did not always pay attention to the paper as a whole, which resulted in problems with coherence or grammar, and even instances of plagiarism. Results indicate that strategy training does not guarantee an outcome of successful revision. This suggests that revision will be more effective for student paper development if understood as part of the creative process of writing rather than mere error correction. Based on these results, several proposals are made for modifying the comment process.

This article introduces the idea of grammar agreements as a way to offer a more “finely tuned approach” to grammar feedback in the L2 classroom (Ferris, Liu, Sinha, & Senna, p. 307). These agreements offer students options for how the teacher will respond to writing done in their first-year composition classes. The authors offer suggestions for both why grammar agreements are a useful tool in the L2 writing classroom (and possibly beyond) and how to implement grammar agreements effectively.

An ALP writing assignment provides a forum for student-faculty dialogue about academic and non-cognitive issues and serves as both a program and student assessment tool. Qualitative and quantitative studies reveal that students often mistakenly believe they are proficient regarding grammar and success strategies alike. Faculty can support students by recognizing that student success is tightly bound to the context in which students learn and striving to create an environment that explicitly addresses grammar and success concepts.

It has been established that in the Netherlands, as in other countries, a majority of students do not attain the desired level of writing skills at the end of elementary school. Time devoted to writing is limited, and only a minority of schools succeed in effectively teaching writing. An improvement in the way writing is taught in elementary school is clearly required. In order to identify effective instructional practices we conducted a meta-analysis of writing intervention studies aimed at grade 4 to 6 in a regular school setting. Average effect sizes were calculated for ten intervention categories: strategy instruction, text structure instruction, pre-writing activities, peer assistance, grammar instruction, feedback, evaluation, process approach, goal setting, and revision. Five of these categories yielded statistically significant results. Pairwise comparison of these categories revealed that goal setting (ES = 2.03) is the most effective intervention to improve students’ writing performance, followed by strategy instruction (ES = .96), text structure instruction (ES = .76), peer assistance (ES = .59), and feedback (ES = .88) respectively. Further research is needed to examine how these interventions can be implemented effectively in classrooms to improve elementary students’ writing performance.

Information management of discourse – the ability of a writer to use linguistic forms to organize and present information in a written text – is a key component of second language (L2) ability models in the language assessment literature (e.g., Canale & Swain, 1980; Weigle, 2002), but Purpura’s (2004) language ability model developed specifically for assessment purposes is the only one that considers it to be part of the ability to use grammar accurately and meaningfully when producing a text in an L2. The current study investigated whether L2 academic writing teachers consider information management of discourse as an assessment criterion when assessing grammar in L2 academic texts. Fourteen students in an academic English as a second language writing course at an English-medium university in Canada and their teacher participated in this case study. Students’ essay exam scripts were collected, and the Theme-Rheme progression (TRP) patterns and links (Daneš, 1974) as well as the distribution of new and given information (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) in these essays were analyzed. Pearson correlation coefficients between the teacher-assigned grammar grade and the results from the TRP and information distribution analyses were calculated. The findings indicate that information management of discourse indeed forms part of the assessment criteria for grammar in academic writing for the teacher in this study. The implications of this finding for L2 writing pedagogy are discussed.

The Millennial Generation presents a unique set of challenges to the classroom, including the desire to multi-task and teamwork as well as a strong need for attention and validation. Frequently, this creates a conflict between the students’ current skills and the teacher’s expectations when it comes to drafting and revision efforts. Restructuring traditional peer response methods into a group conferencing method allows students to utilize their current strengths while building skills necessary for later writing assignments. By participating in a six-step activity that occurs during a seventy-five minute class period, students are asked to listen, read, write, respond, discuss, and apply writing techniques. Over the semester, the author finds that students are invited into the writing discourse by developing vocabulary representative of global writing issues (development, transitions, paragraph structure, etc.) as well as that of grammar and mechanics. In the process, students learn how to trust their instincts and listen to others while participating in a methodical approach to decision-making.

This article shows how brief psycholinguistic reading experiments can illustrate the effects of various grammatical features, pique students’ interest, and position them to construct their own understanding of English grammar, separate from the teacher’s dictates.

Although handwriting is typically taught during early childhood and keyboarding may not be taught explicitly, both may be relevant to writing development in the later grades. Thus, Study 1 investigated automatic production of the ordered alphabet from memory for manuscript (unjoined), cursive (joined), and keyboard letter modes (alphabet 15 sec) and their relationships with each other and spelling and composing in typically developing writers in grades 4 to 7 (N = 113). Study 2 compared students with dysgraphia (impaired handwriting, n=27), dyslexia (impaired word spelling, n=40), or oral and written language learning disability (OWL LD) (impaired syntax composing, n=11) or controls without specific writing disabilities (n=10) in grades 4 to 9 (N=88) on the same alphabet 15 modes, manner of copying (best or fast), spelling, and sentence composing. In Study 1, sequential multilevel model regressions of predictor alphabet 15 letter production/selection modes on spelling and composition outcomes, measured annually from grade 4 to grade 7 (ages 9 to 13 years), showed that only the cursive mode uniquely, positively, and consistently predicted both spelling and composing in each grade. For composing, in grade 4 manuscript mode was positively predictive and in grades 5-7 keyboard selection was. In Study 2 all letter production modes correlated with each other and one's best and fast sentence copying, spelling, and timed sentence composing. The groups with specific writing disabilities differed from control group on alphabet 15 manuscript mode, copy fast, and timed sentence composing. The dysgraphia and dyslexia groups differed on copying sentences in one's best handwriting, with the dysgraphia group scoring lower. The educational and theoretical significance of the findings are discussed for multiple modes and manners of letter production/selection of the alphabet that support spelling and composing beyond the early grades in students with and without specific writing disabilities.

We examine the explanatory weight of child-related and contextual factors on first graders’ achievements in spelling and separation between words. The participants were 215 kindergartners, 113 boys and 102 girls (M = 5 years 4 months, SD = 4 months) from both monolingual and bilingual communities in Spain. They were native speakers of Spanish in the monolingual communities and bilingual Spanish/Catalan or Spanish/Basque speakers in the bilingual communities and had Catalan and Basque, respectively, as the language of instruction. The three languages have shallow orthographies. Children were first examined in kindergarten in a number of literacy related abilities (e.g., knowledge of letters, writing) to detect predictors of spelling and separation between words that were, in turn, evaluated at the end of first grade of elementary school. All the participants were assessed in their language of instruction. The best explanatory models were those including interactions among child-level factors and between these factors and contextual variables. Only knowledge of writing in kindergarten appeared as the common explanatory factor for first graders’ attainments. Attainments in spelling were predicted by children’s level of literacy and knowledge of letters moderated by parent’s education; performance in word separation was predicted by phonological awareness and vocabulary knowledge moderated by parental education. Teaching practices affected spelling performance but not learning to separate between words.

Literacy research has not yet revealed how bilingual learners develop coherent and robust theories of language. Translation, however, provides emergent bilinguals (EL students) with opportunities to develop metalinguistic awareness, which can lead to a more complete conceptual framework for thinking about language and literacy. This preliminary research study sought to formulate an instructional approach (TRANSLATE: Teaching Reading and New Strategic Language Approaches to English learners) focused on using translation to ultimately improve ELL students’ reading comprehension. Using design research methods and qualitative analytical techniques, researchers asked middle school students described as struggling readers to work collaboratively and use various strategies to translate key excerpts from their required English literature curriculum into Spanish. Analysis of students’ statements, decision making, and interaction indicated that students’ conceptual understandings about language played an important role in their learning. Students reflected on the nature of vocabulary, syntax, and the ways that different languages communicate ideas. These findings extend conversations in literacy studies concerning the unique affordances of bilingualism to increase metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness, known contributors to higher levels of reading comprehension.

Providing English language learners with effective feedback on their writing is an issue facing many writing teachers. This article focuses on English language learners’ perceptions of both direct and indirect form-focused written feedback and how these perceptions might change over time. Forty-two advanced level students in an intensive English program at a large U.S. university participated in two surveys, one at the beginning of the term and one at the end. They were asked to rate and comment on the usefulness of five types of feedback (three indirect and two direct) for the purposes of both text revision and the learning of grammar and writing. Students perceived the feedback types that provide codes, comments, and/or explanations as being more useful overall in text revision than other forms of feedback. Findings indicate that students’ perceptions regarding the usefulness of feedback types changed throughout the course. Three areas of feedback that students focused on as their perceptions change are identified, as are reasons why students did or did not value each of the feedback types.

AbstractWhat emerged out of Kenneth Burke’s engagements with T. S. Eliot—particularly his engagements with Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral? An examination of Burke’s comments on Eliot in Permanence and Change, Attitudes Toward History, A Grammar of Motives, and A Rhetoric of Motives, as well as in his unpublished correspondence reveals examples of the emerging and developing concepts surrounding Burkean identification. Taken in the context of Burke’s own conflicting commitments to aestheticist and social perspectives on art, such a portrait supports the thesis that identification is not a one-time state to be achieved, but instead is an ongoing rhetorical–dialectical process that must be constantly maintained through negotiation. Ultimately, for Burke, Eliot and Murder reflected the rhetorical concerns he dedicated his career to exploring: How do our perspectives limit us, how do they divide us, and how do we transcend those divisions? Notes1 Collected in the Kenneth Burke Papers housed in the Special Collections Library at Pennsylvania State University. Quotations from the Kenneth Burke Papers are reproduced with permission from the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust. The Malcolm Cowley quotation on page nine (which does not appear in Jay) is also taken from a letter in the Kenneth Burke Papers and reproduced with permission of Robert Cowley.2 Dana Anderson defines identification as “the process of perceiving the self in relation to the various social scenes it occupies” (26) while Gregory Clark likewise discusses identification (and more largely, rhetoric) as a process of interaction between self (individual) and collective identity (3).3 For example, Clark discusses “identifications” that occur in “moments of identification” (3), suggesting an underlying focus on identification as discrete, countable—a moment(or moments) at the end of a process. Anderson notes the process of identification as it relates to the construction and (strategic) deployment of identity, though this analysis of identification necessarily focuses on moments of fluctuating stability where identities are perceived in relation to social scenes (26).4 For more on the expansion of the modernist canon, see Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz.5 I should note here that I have found no evidence that Burke and Eliot ever actually spoke or corresponded. In an April 27, 1947 letter to James Sibley Watson, Burke mentions his plans to attend one of Eliot’s lectures on Milton the following Saturday; however, I have found no further mention of the lecture in Burke’s correspondence. Burke nevertheless analyzes Eliot’s literary and critical publications throughout his career, although I have no evidence that Eliot ever took note of Burke.6 For a detailed argument on Permanence and Change as a cultural history, see chapter 3 of George and Selzer.7 This passage, along with several others, was subsequently deleted in the 1954 revised edition of P&C. Here I have provided the 1935 edition page numbers for the excised content; however, other references to P&C in this manuscript, unless otherwise noted, refer to the reprinted 1984 University of California Press edition. For more on the printing history and “Lost Passages” of P&C, see Edward Schiappa and Mary Keehner.8 In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke accounts for heterogeneity in consubstantiality by explaining that a “thing’s identity would … be its uniqueness as an entity in itself and by itself, a demarcated unit having its own particular structure. However, ‘substance’ is an abstruse philosophic term, beset by a long history of quandaries and puzzlements … an acting-together; and in the acting-together, men have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes that make them consubstantial” (21). In other words, consubstantiality does not preclude heterogeneity because it is an act, not a state of being, and people can share in an act.9 I use transcendence here and throughout this essay in the Burkean sense—that is, the expansion of a particular perspective to encompass opposing perspectives.10 Murder in the Cathedral is Eliot’s retelling of the death of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered by knights of King Henry II in Canterbury Cathedral. Burke’s focus is primarily on the actual death scene in the play, where Becket is killed and the four murderers turn and address the audience in prose to justify their act.11 Burke provides a succinct summary of this reading in a letter to Malcolm Cowley: “Issue: the approach to God through elegance. How you leave the old locale behind, because it isn’t elegant enough. How you build up elegance by antithesis. And then search for its reality-here-and-now abroad. But eventually discover that only God is elegant enough” (Burke to Cowley, April 13, 1936).12 It is worth noting that Burke eventually says the character of Saint Thomas “specifically use[s] the dramatist grammar” by meditating on human motives “in terms of ‘action’ and ‘passion’” (GM 263). This is, however, not a novel reading of the play—many critics have also noted the action-passion motif in Murder. In the book T. S. Eliot’s Dramatic Theory and Practice, Carol H. Smith points out that a large part of the action-suffering motif “rests in the realization that to ‘act’ in the illusion of freedom from God’s laws is the strongest kind of bondage to the world of the senses, while to exercise the freedom of the will by ‘suffering’ God’s will is to be freed from the torture-wheel of life” (80–81).Burke further considers freedom and action-passion duality in the ending dialogue of The Rhetoric of Religion. Here, Satan explains that because acts are by definition free, human beings must also be free, since they are capable of action (281). The Lord goes on to point out that “action (along with its grammatical partner passion)” are the basis of drama, which is particularly important because “of the large part that the arts of comedy and tragedy will play in [humans’] outlook, extending even to their ideas of ultimate salvation” (281).13 Randy Malamud likewise describes this scene as a “shocking contrast to the play’s passionate crescendo” where the murderers “step forward and address the audience in prose rhetoric evocative of a sloppy after-dinner speech” (69).14 Burke will later point out in A Grammar of Motives that “Eliot specifically considers the action-motion relation” here (263).15 Of course, Burke makes a similar argument in his now oft-commented on address to the First American Writer’s Congress, titled “Revolutinoary Symbolism in America,” where he claims “The complete propagandist, it seems to me, would take an interest in as many imaginative, aesthetic, and speculative as he can handle—and into this breadth of his concerns weave a general attitude of sympathy for the oppressed and antipathy towards our oppressive institutions” (Simmons and Melia 268).16 I infer this from the various ways Burke discusses Eliot in other sources. In the Rhetoric, Burke contrasts Eliot’s subdued, “smart” lamentations with the “full-throated outpourings of Biblical lamentations” (318). In the following letter, Mr. A is likewise unable to “make his bellyache full-throated,” so he couches it with cleverness and romantic irony.17 Eliot’s obvious discontent with modern life has become an interpretive staple for reading his work. See Carol Smith vii; Mary Karr ix–xxvii; Burton Raffel 8–10; and Peter Ackroyd.18 Tate’s article, to which Burke refers, is “A Poetry of Ideas,” published in the June 1926 issue of the New Republic. In the particular scene Tate examines, the speaker of the poem takes a critical (or Burke says, superior) tone toward a house agent’s clerk who is seducing a young woman.19 In between these October 4 and October 8 letters from Tate to Burke is Burke’s missing response in which he critiques Tate’s stance on Eliot. Although I searched, I could not find the text of Burke’s missing letter (written sometime between Oct 4 and 8, 1941), which I infer elucidates his misgivings toward Tate’s improvised psychology for Eliot. Neither the Kenneth Burke Papers at Pennsylvania State University nor the Allen Tate Papers at Princeton University had a copy, and as a result, I can only assemble Burke’s criticisms in light of Tate’s responses, which, while helpful in piecing together the quarrel, nonetheless leave some of the details of Burke’s thought to be discovered.20 For more sites of inquiry into Burke’s evolving notion of identification, under various guises, see “Boring from Within” (1931), “Auscultation, Creation, Revision” (1932), and “Twelve Propositions” (1938).21 For a brief overview of scholarship on Burke’s guilt-purification-redemption cycle, particularly as it focuses on victimage/mortification, see David Bobbit (9–10) and William Rueckert.22 See, for example, Jeanne Fisher’s Burkean analysis of murder/suicide as a symbolic act or Brian Ott and Eric Aoki’s analysis of Matthew Sheppard’s murder and the subsequent public/media response. For Fischer, mass murderer Joseph White’s act of killing, stood in for, or symbolized the internal attitude that festered inside him toward his victims (188). Furthermore, Ott and Aoki complicate this process by adding a social dimension to Fischer’s arguments. If, as Fischer might argue, the killing of Matthew Sheppard symbolized the attitude of homophobia present in larger American society, then Ott and Aoki argue that the media coverage of the Matthew Sheppard case emphasized Burke’s scapegoat process, functioning rhetorically “to alleviate the public’s guilt concerning anti-gay hate crimes and to excuse the public of any social culpability” (1). However, despite being intimately thematically connected to Burke’s ideas of slaying and symbolism—and despite being thorough, complex, and ground-breaking articles—neither Fisher nor Ott and Aoki engages explicitly with the slaying discussion from those first few pages of A Rhetoric of Motives.23 I need to explain the difference between my senses of “transformation” and “transcendence.” Transformation in the generic sense is any type of change (terminological, perspectival, etc.), while transcendence, as it has been used so far in the more specific Burkean sense, involves achieving a stance which encompasses opposing terms or perspectives. Therefore, for my purposes here, the transcendence Burke speaks of is a type of more generic transformation, although the terms are not interchangeable.24 This is in line with Ross Wolin’s claim that “Collaboration is the key to style as the engine of identification” (189).25 This is not a new claim, but an old claim with new dimensions. Timothy Crusius likewise argues that “When language is used to overcome … differences, to foster cooperation and establish community, we are in the realm of rhetoric” (24). However, the implication one can draw from Eliot’s wheel is that establishing community is not a one-time act—it requires constant negotiation and readjustment to preserve the consubstantiality achieved.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJohn BelkJohn Belk is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at Pennsylvania State University, 134 Burrowes Building, University Park, PA 16803, USA. jmb851@psu.edu

While research in L2 language and literacy in academic contexts has shed light on learning language per se (e.g., students’ development of syntactic complexity), classroom situations, in which ESL students engage in English and make it meaningful to them, have received far less attention. With a sociocultural perspective, this qualitative case study examined the discursive practices of a face-to-face community college ESL classroom and of its online discussion forums. We found that the discourse in the face-to-face classroom tended to prioritize shaping students’ academic knowledge and identity, pushing aside knowledge and identities that were peer- or life-worldbased. In contrast, the online forums afforded discourses through which students displayed peer-based, life-world, and academic knowledge and identities, while negotiating responses to academic assignments. The study suggests that classroom-based online forums can provide a space for the legitimate display of students’ nonacademic discourses in the service of academic work.

In sixteenth-century male writers’ descriptions of the English grammar school program, mothers were imagined as impediments to boys’ learning. Yet these same writers paradoxically turned to a “mother” figure, prosopopoeia, as the rhetorical device through which they imagined and brought into being a humanist-inspired education. By embedding maternal narratives, bodies, and language in their explanations of grammar school and its “mat(t)er,” the writers of rhetorical manuals, grammar school textbooks, and pedagogical handbooks position the mother at the center of early modern thought, which has implications and consequences for actual mothers and their participation in early modern rhetorical education.

Reviews 317 Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380-1620 (OxfordWarburg Studies), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 345 pp ISBN: 978-0-19-959728-4 In A bdistoi i/ of Renaissance Rhetoric 2380—1620, Peter Mack expertly describes the fortunes of Renaissance rhetoric within its academic and textual settings. Rhetoric in the Renaissance was a school subject, mostly covered in the grammar schools, with secondary importance in the universities, and thousands of rhetorical textbooks from the period survive as testimony to its ascendancy within the liberal arts curriculum. With a dizzying command of technical detail, Mack has delved into this large and complex textual record and emerged with a synthesis that will be required reading for students of the subject. Beginning with a description of the most significant ancient treatises on rhetoric, followed by a chapter on the contributions of key fifteenth-century Italians (and one notable Cretan, George of Trebizond), Mack proceeds to a series of four chapters focused on teachers whose textbooks had an extraordinary impact on the theory and teaching of rhetoric in the sixteenth century: Rudolph Agricola, Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Ramus. The chapter on Melanchthon, the "dominant figure" of the years 1519-45 (p. 104), is filled out with sections on his chief students and followers. The chapter on Ramus (and his associate Omer Talon) gives a useful overview of the controversy and key combatants surrounding his polarizing reforms. With helpful tables outlining the contents of their principle writings on rhetoric, Mack charts their innovative and (again in the case of Ramus) agonistic adaptations of the classical program. The first half of the book is therefore devoted to the big players in the book market for Renaissance rhetoric - those whose work best adapted the classical program to the educational needs and occasions of the humanist school. Indeed, for much of the period that Mack describes, Renaissance rhetoric was a symbiosis of two types of books on rhetoric: classical (Ciceronian) treatises and humanist manuals. For most of the sixteenth century, there is a strong correlation between the numbers of editions of the Rhetorica ad Herennium (still generally attributed to Cicero in the period) and the most popular humanist treatises (pp. 30-2). Mack explains the apparent symbiosis by noting the frequent use of humanist treatises as a preliminary study, a prologue to the study of a full-length classical treatise. But after decades of steady demand, humanist manuals and classical treatises alike suffer steep declines in production after the 1560s. The cause of the sudden decline is not clear, though Mack offers a number of suggestions: the rising fortunes of Talon's rhetoric, which was not coupled to full-length treatises; new syntheses of classical and humanist rhetoric, such as found in the popular De arte rhetorica libri tres (1562) of the Jesuit educator Cyprian Soarez; the scholastic revival of the late-sixteenth century; or even the efficiency of the second-hand book market to meet continuing demand for humanist and classical rhetorics. 318 RHETORICA Renaissance rhetoric was equally tied up with the fortunes of the liberal arts, especially logic or dialectic. It is one of the virtues of HRR 1380— 1620 that it provides through the main part of the narrative a parallel account of the fortunes of both humanist rhetoric and dialectic. Melanchthon described his textbooks on rhetoric and dialectic as companion pieces, and even Ramus, who notoriously drew a sharp distinction between dialectic and rhetoric, distributing four of the five classical offices of rhetoric between them, insisted on the necessity and complementarity of both (pp. 142-5). Both rhetoric and dialectic were combined in a very influential method of critical reading, one of the uses of Renaissance rhetoric to which Mack is especially attentive. The parallel fortunes of rhetoric and dialectic in northern Europe that Mack tells in the first half of the book are complemented, in the second half, by a chapter on the fortunes of rhetoric in southern Europe in the sixteenth-century (chapter 8), and chapters on the contemporary fortunes of specialized rhetorical treatises: manuals of tropes and figures (chapter 10), letter-writing manuals (chapter 11), preaching manuals and legal di­ alectics (chapter 12), and vernacular rhetorics (chapter 13). In...

ment workshop gone awry. A session on responding to student work—meant to introduce the commenting philosophies fundamental to writing studies—became derailed when faculty failed to accept the orthodoxy of deemphasizing grammar and sentence-level concerns in favor of global issues, such as content development, elaboration, and arrangement. As Cole notes, such conflicts between writing studies’ principles and the beliefs of faculty in the disciplines are common. Cole responds to the issue pragmatically, reasoning that we will ultimately have greater success in persuading disciplinary faculty of our writing across the curricu-lum / writing in the disciplines (WAC/WID) philosophies if we make some effort to address what they see as the most pressing concerns with student writing. To this end, he provides a list created by faculty on his campus of ten “things ” university students should know about writing—a list he hopes will be revised as needed, over the years, and accepted by all faculty at his institution. He ends with a call to bring “discussions of grammar pedagogy out of the margins, and reconsider how grammar instruction might be optimally reintegrated into our classrooms.”

Various authors argue that invented spelling activities with preschool-age children help them to analyse the oral segments of words and to discover the relations between those segments and the corresponding letters. Several studies have shown the impact of invented spelling programmes on early spelling, but few experimental ones have looked at the impact of invented spelling on early reading. Our aim was to assess the impact of an invented spelling programme on children’s early spelling and reading. We worked with 108 five-year-old Portuguese children who were not able to read or write. Their initial cognitive ability, knowledge of letters and phonological awareness were controlled. Children were randomly divided into an experimental and a control group. They were evaluated in a pre- and a post-test in which they were asked to write and read a set of words. The experimental group participated in a 5-week invented spelling programme. We expected the experimental group to have better post-test scores than the control group. Data analysis showed statistically significant differences between the two groups, with the experimental one having better results in spelling and reading than the control group, supporting the idea that the acquisition of spelling and reading may be mutually facilitative.

The contribution of linguistic, reading, and transcription processes to writing in kindergarten English as a second language (ESL) children and their native-English speaking peers (EL1) were examined. ESL and EL1 performed similarly on one of the two measures of phonological awareness (PA) and on measures of early reading, spelling, and writing. EL1 outperformed ESL on a pseudoword repetition task and on the English vocabulary and syntactic knowledge tasks. ESL outperformed EL1 on a writing fluency measure. Correlation and hierarchical regression results varied as a function of the writing tasks (procedural or generative) and language status. Across language groups, writing tasks that captured children's developing graphophonemic knowledge were associated with a breadth of cognitive, linguistic, and early literacy skills. PA, reading, and transcription skills, but not oral vocabulary and syntactic knowledge contributed the most variance to writing irrespective of language status. The results suggest that parallel component skills and processes underlie ESL and EL1 children's early writing when formal literacy instruction begins in kindergarten even though ESL children are developing English oral and literacy proficiency simultaneously.

This study of 29 teachers from four states in the US investigated teachers' orientations towards writing and the influences on their beliefs. Through interviews about writing instruction, the researchers found significant differences between teachers in high and low-income schools. While teachers in high-income schools valued rhetorical style, developing voice, and reading-writing connections, teachers in low-income schools focused on grammar, mechanics and sentence structure. Teachers in high-income schools appear to be exercising more choice in curricular materials and valuing quality of writing beyond grammar and mechanics, whereas teachers in low-income schools are using specific curriculum mandated by the districts. Influences on teachers' orientations included school context, programs and materials, and assessments. The study raises concerns that students in low-income schools are missing out on authentic, challenging, and meaningful writing opportunities since the focus is on skills-based instruction. The findings point to the need for teachers to provide all students with opportunities to develop rhetorical style, voice, and reading-writing connections in addition to grammar, mechanics, and sentence structure.

Reviews Carruthers, Mary, ed., Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in theArts oftheMiddleAges. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, ed. Alastair Minnis). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xii + 316 pp. ISBN 9780521515306. Carruthers' edited collection shows how rhetorical theory informs and is informed by the visual, mechanical, and performative arts of the Mid­ dle Ages, with origins in the classical rhetorical tradition. This collection is groundbreaking in several ways: 1) by demonstrating the interconnected­ ness of medieval genres of rhetoric, 2) by expanding the canon of rhetorical texts, from classical origins to later adaptations, and 3) by suggesting av­ enues for further research across disciplinary lines. Thus, it transforms our understanding of rhetoric and expands it to new areas, especially oral and written performance in the Middle Ages. This collection will also appeal to those interested in medieval cultural studies through the study of verbal, visual, and performative arts as rhetoric. Paul Binski's essay, "'Working by words alone': the architect, scholas­ ticism and rhetoric in thirteenth-century France," opens the collection by relating thirteenth-century scholastic and rhetorical discourse and architec­ ture as influential on High Gothic architecture. Not only were architectural terms imported into rhetorical treatises, but also the architect as auctor, cre­ ator, master of a craft, was elevated to a new plane of authority. Central to this authority is that of planning, envisioning in the mind, foreknowing the work to be constructed, a skill required of both rhetor and architect. In "Grammar and rhetoric in late medieval polyphony: modern meta­ phor or old simile," Margaret Bent takes cross-disciplinary applications of rhetoric into the realm of performance by exploring intersections among terms employed in medieval music and grammar and rhetoric. Shared terminology, such as definitions, metaphors, and similes parallel musical structures. Other correspondences between rhetoric and music include the parts of an oration in arrangement and punctuation in notation, rhetoric in and as performance art. "Nature's forge and mechanical production: writing, reading and per­ forming song" continues this theme. Elizabeth Eva Leach develops the metaphor of the forge through collaborative invention in song, challenging Rhetorica, Vol. XXXI, Issue 2, pp. 220-237, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2013.31.2.220. Reviews 221 a common assumption that pieces were written first by a solitary composer or lyricist and then rehearsed by singers. Instead, she argues for "viewing the musical trace as a series of more or less precise memorial notae from which singers invent a collaborative (simultaneous) performance" (72). Her findings corroborate research on early modern theatre, as she explains in the latter half of her essay, thus broadening and transcending genre lines through a concept of composing process with parallels in two performance arts. Lucy Freeman Sandler's essay, "Rhetorical strategies in the pictorial im­ agery of fourteenth-century manuscripts: the case of the Bohun psalters," in­ troduces rare evidence of a rhetorical appeal from artists to patrons, through illuminations of psalters commissioned by the Bohun earls of Essex in the fourteenth century. Two artists, both Augustinian friars, employ images that relate biblical scenes to social and political matters relevant to their pa­ trons, thereby providing moral and theological counsel in devotional prac­ tice. Thus, the rhetoric of the art mirrors that of the drama, in which reader becomes actor: "For the Bohuns, reading and recitation of the psalms or the Hours of the Virgin, a devotional exercise that was repeated over and over, was associated with study of the fundamental narratives of human and sacred history in the Old and New Testaments in pictorial form" (117). This parallel opens pathways for research on intersections among private devotion, art and drama. Similarly, in "Do actions speak louder than words? The scope and role of pronuntiatio in the Latin rhetorical tradition, with special reference to the Cistercians," Jan M. Ziolkowski takes up the theme of performance in the Latin rhetorical tradition through actio (gesture) and pronuntiatio (elocution...

226 RHETORICA Matthew Lauzon, Signs ofLight: French and British Theories ofLinguistic Communication, 1648-1789, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.256 pp. ISBN 9780801448478. Matthew Lauzon's Signs ofLight: French and British Theories ofLinguistic Communication, 1648-1789 explores a broad array of Enlightenment perspec­ tives on discourse, from seventeenth-century discussions of Native Amer­ ican eloquence and animal communication to the longstanding debate over the relative merits of English and French that continued up to the French Revolution. Arguing that historians of the period, who overemphasize the impact of Locke's view of language, "have therefore tended to ignore both the period's tremendous engagement with the broader social implications of different languages that prevailed across the European republic of let­ ters and the ways in which such an engagement involved much more than issues of semantic and logical clarity" (p. 4), he surveys a wide range of treatises, literary works, reports, and studies to demonstrate the diversity of Enlightenment views concerning language and human community. The book is divided into three primary sections, each comprising a pair of chapters. Part I, "Animal Communication," seeks to fill the gap left by historians who have neglected "the suggestion by some in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that animals might communicate more clearly and therefore more effectively" than humans (p. 9). The first chapter in this section, "Bestial Banter," takes up Enlightenment claims of the potential su­ periority of animal communication developed by relatively obscure figures such as Marin Cureau de la Chambre and John Webster, as well as more well-known theorists such as John Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau. The second chapter, "Homo Risus: Making Light of Animal Language," features Enlightenment critiques of animal languages, both real and imaginary, that elucidate the complexity of human discourse and attempt to destabilize the virtue of clarity developed in the previous chapter. Lauzon provides analyses of Bernard Mandeville's The Fable ofthe Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, part 4 Four of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant's Amusement philosophique sur le langage des betes. Part II, "Savage Eloquence," explores "how late-seventeenth-century missionary concerns about the sincerity of American Indian conversions gen­ erated a particularly positive representation of savage speech" (p. 6). Chap­ ter 3, entitled "Warming Savage Hearts and Heating Eloquent Tongues," emphasizes the seventeenth-century Puritans' and Jesuits' praise of the elo­ quence of Native American converts to Christianity. Featuring a series of works produced by John Eliot and his missionary colleagues, Lauzon ar­ gues that the Puritans were impressed by the pathos of Native American Christians, whose words reflected the "Christian grand style" originally identified by Augustine. Through analyses of texts from the Jesuit Relations, which recorded seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit activities in the New World, Lauzon demonstrates that Jesuit missionaries also praised what amounted to that style in the emotional appeals of Native American converts, Reviews 227 who communicated far more movingly than conventional touchstones of Jesuit rhetoric like Cicero" (p. 90). Chapter 4, "From Savage Orators to Sav­ age Languages/' marshals subsequent Enlightenment treatments of the per­ ceived energetic quality of Native American languages as further critique of Locke's rather single-minded emphasis on clarity. The final section of Szy/zs ofLight, "Civilized Tongues," features "discus­ sions about how the French and English languages reflected and reinforced distinct national practices of enlightened communication" (p. 7). Chapter 5, "French Levity," treats the spirited argument for the superiority the French language set forth bv advocates such as François Charpentier, Nicholas Beuzée, Antoine de Rivarol, Denis Diderot, and Dominique de Bouhours, based on criteria such as clarity, the sweetness of its soft sounds, the "light­ ness" of its lexicon (p. 146), the wit of the bel esprit, and its universality. The final chapter, "English Energy," provides the corresponding arguments in praise of the English tongue, which emphasized its phonotactic qualities, its syntax, its gravity, and its ability to express natural passions. Lauzon's Coda, "French Levity and English Energy in the Revolutionary Wake," extends the issues raised in chapters 5 and 6 through and beyond the French Revolution. The particular strengths of Signs ofLight are the extensive range of works and...