Drawing on a study involving interviews with 20 students each semester until graduation, this article examines how participants understood and articulated their writing processes and how they perceived those processes changing over time. Although they initially struggled to find language to describe what they were doing when they wrote, falling…

While close analysis of individual composing processes has been the major accomplishment of recent writing research, this research has not yet sufficiently considered how students develop as learners. The work of William Perry, a developmental psychologist, can contribute to an understanding of that development. Based on an analysis of interviews…

Students in college basic writing courses need to consider their own written language and to compare it with other students' work before they can develop a sense of the symbolic relationship between language and experience. Because of a lack of previous writing experience, basic writers have no sense that the "facts" about which they…

High school English teacher from Hannahville Indian School (Wilson, Michigan) describes an approach to teaching writing that gives students ownership of the writing process, encourages creativity and self-expression, increases self-esteem, and fosters emotional and spiritual healing. Examples of students' poetry reflect issues facing American…

This article examines writing conference discourse in one English as a Second Language (ESL) basic composition course. The study is based on a 25,000-word corpus of 10 writing conference interactions between the instructor and seven students. Through a microlevel analysis, the authors demonstrate how and to what degree the writing conference can…