Herrington & Curtis (2000), building on Goldblatt's (1995) idea of the "sponsoring institution," (p. 48) showed students' need for a personal sense of connection with a "sponsoring discourse" when writing in the academy. As Herrington and Curtis, as well as Goldblatt point out, these "sponsoring discourses" often come from outside the academy.…

This paper describes some aspects of essays produced by students who as writers in the United States would commonly be called "basic writers." The paper focuses primarily on the grammatical subjects in these essays and offers a view of how closely grammatical structure typical in speech correspond to those typical in writing. It reports…

Considers the changing definition of "academic discourse" in basic writing instruction. Focuses on preparing students for success in school. Refines positions sketched in an earlier essay. Asserts that new forms of academic discourse mix traditional academic with non-academic discourses, reflecting the profound cultural mixing occurring in the…

Examines phonological transfer in developmental student writing (spelling or word configurations that represent what the writer hears). Examines two discourse features--"by strings" and "topic/comment" sentence structures. Analyzes a developmental writing African American student's essay, demonstrating the power and tension in…

More than ten years have passed since the widely publicized debate about personal and academic writing that played out in the 1990s between Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae. But the question of the relative merits of these two different types of writing for student writers continues to be an issue of concern for teachers of composition,…

A study focused attention on the academic personas acquired by two AAVE-oriented (African American Vernacular English) beginning writers as reflected by their speech in informal settings and the style they employed in academic tasks. The study explores the degree to which literacy experiences (home and school) affect students' lives. It was guided…

Language interference (which was originally posited in ESL theory) involves ways in which language learners draw upon previous language experiences to fill holes in their knowledge of a second language they are learning. Since the 1970s, language interference has been a part of the pedagogy of basic writing, concerning itself with ways that basic…