This essay illuminates adaptable and multimodal ways of teaching with etymology and idiomatic origin stories in the composition classroom. I model my pedagogical approach with a topic central to my rhetorical research--pigeons in histories of human communication--and the rich etymologically-linked concepts of homing in, pigeonholing, and…

Continuation writing was recently introduced as a new element of China's English as a Foreign Language (EFL) assessment. The assessment task requires students to complete the story within a set word limit. Preparing students for this task is challenging for Chinese EFL teachers, as little pedagogical guidance is supplied. Given the recent trend of…

Drawing on the findings of an ESRC-funded research study, which included a detailed linguistic analysis of a large corpus of writing from secondary English classrooms, this article describes patterns of linguistic deployment at the level of the sentence. Given the limited number of applied linguistic studies which consider writing development in…

Researchers and instructors have been interested in the investigation and teaching of formulaic sequences for the past four decades. In academic writing, for example, these expressions are extremely frequent in the production of published authors in academic disciplines but rarely used by university students. The present study focused on the…

This paper discusses the possibility of using newspaper genres and genre-based pedagogy to teach intermediate ESL learners to write school genres. Students' typical writing problems reveal the inadequacy of the typical composition classroom instruction. Then two texts regarded as typical representations of the editorial and the school…

A discussion of passive verb forms and the passive voice attempts to explain the nature of passives and to offer composition teachers some reference points for teaching them. Twelve arguments are proposed to explain resistance to the teaching of passives; each is termed a continuum in order to help assess understandings and attitudes. The 12…

An approach to teaching expository writing in English as a Second Language (ESL) to native speakers of Chinese is offered. It is based on a comparison and classification of rhetorical patterns in the two languages. Chinese rhetoric contains a wide variety of methods of presentation, including both direct and indirect, or metaphoric, forms. It is…

Discussion of one form of pragmatic competence, projecting a sense of stylistic voice into texts, explores how writing in a non-native language affects the ability to express stylistic voice and enter into social dialogue with readers. Using the published reflections of authors writing professionally in a non-native language, the analysis shows…

Using a comparative rhetoric model, a study examined the discourse behavior of native speakers of American English conducting peer review discussions in English and that of native speakers of Chinese performing the same task in Chinese. Data are drawn from audiotape recordings of peer review discussions of eight college students, conducted in…