This article explores David Russell's long-time fascination with Genre as Social Action and Charles Bazerman's idea of genre systems (1994), based on Miller's 1984 article. He explains that the great insight Miller had, in that article, was to bring Schutz's concept of typification, and with it the western European tradition of phenomenological…

The author integrates work from cognitive and developmental psychology with studies in writing in order to explain why the quality of student writing sometimes appears to regress to earlier or less proficient levels. Insights from this combined analysis are applied to explain how and why to use specific Writing Across the Curriculum strategies to…

Trickster tales, with their teachings on how to behave in the world, are a powerful means for transmitting social knowledge and cultural mores to children. In this study we compared two approaches to teaching fourth-grade students to write trickster tales. Although both instructional methods incorporated aspects of the writing process approach,…

The theoretical background and empirical studies concerned with the relationship between language and cognition in bilingual children and in bilingual mildly retarded children are examined. It is suggested that the effects of bilingualism are not necessarily detrimental to mildly handicapped children. Cognitive and interactional factors in the…

A study investigated the effects on students' cognitive development of a freshman composition course in which reading, writing, and discussion were integrated in an attempt to increase students' awareness of ambiguities, uncertainties, and complexities. The design of the one-semester course was derived from William Perry's theory of…

Scholars from varied disciplines--first language (L1) acquisition, second language (L2) acquisition, composition research, and cognitive psychology--have found a high level of permeability in their search for more effective classroom models of writing instruction. Among the most influential work in this area has been Stephen Krashen's theory of L2…

This paper describes three alternative perspectives--information processing, social constructivism, and Piagetian/naturalist--of reading/writing connections and suggests instructional implications influenced by the three perspectives. The paper explores each theory in terms of basic assumptions, related research, and strengths and limitations and…