This article presents a case study of a fourth-grade teacher, Kathy Topaz (all names are pseudonyms), her seventeen students, and the ways that they talked about and rehearsed essay-writing through speech across the school year in an inclusive fourth grade class. With increased focus on informational writing and opinion writing in curriculum and…

One intention that an instructor had for her new course called "Writing and Healing: Women's Journal Writing" was to make apparent the power of self-written text to transform the writer. She asked her students--women studying women writing their lives and women writing their own lives--to write three pages a day and to focus on change.…

Intellectuals lament the disappearance of community, a nostalgia for the small town that has supposedly given way to the anonymous crowds of the city. Likewise, scholars have talked about "discourse communities" in romantic terms, referring to a place where all share the same values. However, a more urban view of social life, in which…

Oral language is an important component of literacy development, yet is often ignored in research and stifled in the classroom. The varied contexts for literate talk in a first-grade classroom were explored. Oral sharing time, writing workshop, reading workshop, whole-class reading time, and project-centers time provided opportunities for rich…

Many instructors are planning to teach their writing classes in the networked computer classroom. Through the use of electronic mail, course listservs, and chat programs, the instructor is offered the opportunity to facilitate a more egalitarian classroom discourse that creates a strong sense of community, not only between students, but also…

In a beginning level creative writing class called "Narration and Description," two student-written stories were collectively peer edited during each session. The class was required to read the student texts before class, critique them, and, with the guidance of four assigned student facilitators, discuss the texts with the author and…

This paper presents an approach to analyzing classroom talk that sheds light on the intellectual work of the classroom. The analysis system extends the theoretical construct of preference organization from conversational analysis to the study of a whole-class, teaching-learning interaction in a ninth-grade English classroom, during which an expert…

The proliferation and subsequent devaluation of electronic symbols necessitate a rethinking of classroom discourse. In recent years, "visual literacy" has become an issue among those who feel that the increasingly symbolic orientation of communications compels the writing instructor to address the dynamics of both visual and written…

The use of computers in English departments, especially in composition classes, has become a primary site of contention between those who find technology liberating and those who find only new configurations of the same old hierarchies. Much of the excitement stems from a perceived connection between new classroom technologies and current theories…