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,…

Arranged chronologically, the essays in this book trace the attempts of one writing teacher (Patricia Bizzell) to understand theoretically--and to respond pedagogically--to what happens when students from diverse backgrounds learn to use language in college. Over the 10-year period chronicled in the essays that make up the book, the teacher sees…

The developmental writing program at Michigan State University offers special attention to students who enter the university at a competitive disadvantage with respect to their ability to express themselves in writing. The primary goal of the program is to seek to empower students so that they will be able to express themselves in writing for the…

Contrastive rhetoric provides tools that community college teachers need in order to understand the rhetorical forms that students from other cultures employ. Greater understanding of contrastive rhetoric can change the way that teachers interpret the difficulty linguistically different students may have in using conventional American academic…

This article relates case histories of basic writing programs at regional campuses in Florida, and the perceived need to incorporate concerns of social class into basic writing curriculum. Attention to class helps scholars identify institutional patterns that distance basic writing from the university's mainstream business. This author describes a…

If personal writing empowers students to hear their own voices and to "see themselves as writers," then personal writing has value for basic writing students, whose voices have tended to be silenced and who see themselves as anything but writers. From hearing their voices in writing, and from identifying multiple sources and rhetorical…

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…

Stretch 107 is a version of English 107 (a first-year composition course for international students at Arizona State University), designed to provide those with low proficiency in English with various strategies for writing acceptable prose in English. Since it is a 2-semester course, Stretch 107 gives students more time to work on their…

In this description of a learning community for "at-risk" and basic writing students at the University of Wyoming, I outline the reasons our students resist academic writing prior to their entry into college--reasons largely unrelated to typical perceptions of at-risk students as "lazy" or intellectually less capable. For…

Describes the deficit theories and skills approaches shaping how teachers, administrators, and students conceive of basic writers. Critiques research on cultural conflict in the classroom and the theory that students must be initiated into academic discourse. Explores John Ogbu's "oppositional culture" theory to better understand basic…