An assignment given to students at the end of an advanced composition class empowers students by helping them grasp principles and develop abilities that allow them to get beyond needing teachers. The crux of the assignment is a heuristic for analyzing any particular type of writing for the purpose of learning to produce it. The students are…

The study examined the encoding function in student note taking in relationship to learning from a university lecture. It was expected that note taking effectiveness would be positively related to learning; and, that the notes of high and low effective note takers would differ significantly. After pretesting, a 551-word lecture on research methods…

Recent research on writing that sheds light on writing instruction in English as a second language (ESL) focuses on contrastive rhetoric (the interference of first language rhetoric experienced by the second language learner), patterns of development in English scientific texts that cause problems for second language readers, the contrastive use…

Three universes of discourse are at work when writers create or use a metaphor: the analogical or metaphorical universe from which they borrow words, things, and relationships (sometimes called the "vehicle"); the contextual universe in which the analogy is being used (sometimes called the "topic"); and the metauniverse, or the comprehensive…

Noting that a major issue in education today is the concern about students' ability to read critically and to solve problems, this paper describes an analysis of five texts focusing on reading and learning in the content areas to determine what they had to say about critical reading and strategies for teaching critical reading--specifically,…