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,…

Traces scholarly constructions of basic writers' identities. Asks what those students who are labeled basic writers are accomplishing in their speech and writing. Offers a speculative model for analyzing basic writing student discourse. Uses that model to examine the language used in a basic writing classroom. Reviews the implications of such work…

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…

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…

Compares the quality and syntactic complexity of 2 types of essays written by 44 college freshmen in a basic writing course. Essays dealing with group-phenomenon events (intensification) had more words per clause, but received lower quality scores than essays dealing with individually experienced events (initiation). (PAA)