Reading is seen by many as an essential ingredient for learning to write. Is the relationship between reading and writing reciprocal? Does the path to better reading involve becoming a good writer? The answer to these questions presents a paradox. One does not have to learn to write in order to learn to read, as learning how to write or type words…

Critical thinking is one of the most highly sought skills in education, yet questions remain about instilling students with this elusive set of skills and dispositions. Is it generalizable or discipline-specific? How should it be taught? This article describes an approach by two middle school teachers who developed and taught an in-person and…

"Pre-K Stories" offers a lively exploration of how one classroom community played with and collaboratively engaged in authorship. Through everyday stories, readers are invited to witness and engage with classroom practices that honor young children's brilliance and build on their questions, interests, and strengths. Weaving together…

This essay, in letter form, introduces graduate-level study in Basic Writing to practicum students. It situates teaching practices within Basic Writing histories and pedagogies, and invites readers to focus widely, read deeply, and keep writing. Included are lessons from Bernstein's experiences in presenting David Bowie's artistic and cultural…

The narrow teaching of writing that had been common in schools for hundreds of years was challenged in the 1980s by 'one of the most seductive writers in the history of writing pedagogy'. Donald Graves's process approach to writing, as it came to be known, was popular in Australia, New Zealand, USA and the UK. At the heart of Graves's approach was…

This paper discusses a collaboration between a criminal justice professor and the coordinator of composition at a small, four-year University in a rural location. The goal was to restructure the writing assignments in criminal justice courses in such a way as to enhance student participation in writing assignments and to improve the quality of…

Future teachers often manifest a low confidence in their own writing and do not see themselves as writers. Developing an identity as authors requires ample opportunities for writing that sustain preservice teachers' discourses and cultural models. As writing across the content areas is considered a powerful way of learning, creating spaces for…

This article details the experiences of two teachers attempting to move music-enhanced English curriculum--using music to teach--to a music-integration approach to teaching--students creating music and advancing their knowledge in English.

From the perspective of writing concepts are most readily identified through conceptual words deployed by writers to evoke conceptual meanings in readers. Although every word has some conceptual weight, this article focuses on words associated with core ideas or classifications or connections of domains of thought--the kinds of terms attended to…

This book is a guide for parents who wish to raise children with more than one language and literacy. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, as well as the experiences of parents of multilingual children, this book walks parents through the multilingual reading and writing process from infancy to adolescence. It identifies essential literacy…

Since Fall 2004, the Undergraduate Catalog at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville has listed a two-part "Communicating through Writing" (WC) requirement, which includes two first-year composition courses and an upper-division course in one of thirty-five majors. Most students fulfill the former by enrolling in English 101 and 102, a…

In the training of doctoral researchers in the use of qualitative research methods, considerable effort goes into preparation for fieldwork and the collection of data. Rather less attention, however, goes into what happens when they have collected their data and begin to make sense of it. In particular, relatively little attention has been paid to…

One of the outcomes of the policy emphasis upon skills formation in countries like Australia and the UK has been an increase in cross-disciplinary structured programs for higher research degrees raising implicit, but often unexamined, questions about the curriculum and expertise that should inform them. Key insights from applied linguistics and…

"Stonehill Writes" is an example of an in-house Writing-Across-the-Curriculum (WAC) journal that records what is being written and how it is being written by administrators, faculty, students, and alumni. Published at Stonehill College, a small liberal arts college with a student body of 1600 and a faculty of 107 full-time teachers, the…

Considers how computing and composition combine for a new form of interdisciplinary learning and intramural cooperation. Offers a description of the analogous processes of problem solving and programming in an introductory computer science course and the writing process typically used in introductory English composition courses. (Author/LRW)