Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to the ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotions, which has been found to play a crucial role in academic achievement. However, there is limited research on the impact of EI on writing performance, particularly in the Ethiopian context. Therefore, this study aims to address this gap by examining the…

A significant problem for practitioners of technical communication is to gain the skills to compete in a global, multicultural work environment. Instructors of technical communication can provide future practitioners with the tools to compete and excel in this global environment by introducing heuristics of cultural dimensions into the…

The literature of the contact zone has done an excellent job of elucidating the ethical demands of the classroom as a hybrid space of variously raced, classed, and gendered subjects discursively engaging across multiple identity boundaries. But a chief concern of one writing teacher is whether and how writing teachers can revise the symbol systems…

The struggle in the composition community regarding the place of personal narrative in academic writing became particularly acute for a class of undergraduate Critical Writing students undertaking ethnographic work. By mid-semester, students had read and produced a series of texts about culture and found themselves reading and writing about…

The borders that separate and connect different cultures often come into sharpest relief when the focus is on themes and motifs found in the literature or the visual arts of several lands. With the Internet, students can discover such points of intercultural contact for themselves, crossing borders that can lead them to a broader perspective on…

Defining risk communication as the "interactive process of exchange of information and opinion among individuals, groups, and institutions,...involving multiple messages about the nature of risk," this Digest argues that risk communication has much to offer instructors of cultural studies composition who want to revive students' sense of…

Suggests that the study of computers in cultural studies classes prepares students to think skeptically and critically about the value, worth, and application of computers in education and life in general. Presents writing assignments within a cultural studies course on technology. (TB)

For one Sansei (third-generation Japanese American) university student who had been brought up by her Japanese grandparents, questions of who she was and how much upbringing and personal experiences had molded her were with her constantly. She questioned how much of her grandfather's and her mother's high expectations had to do with her lack of…

The act of reading is always interpretation through the lens of an individual's own culture and value system. In a World Literature class the encounter between American readers and a text from a different culture can produce 3 results: reading into it the individual's own world; translating the alien into the familiar; and appreciating its…

A multicultural literature course at Loyola Marymount University (California) was designed to complicate ideas of culture with gender issues and explored a common but largely unexplored phenomenon--writers who write outside their own personal backgrounds and identities. The course drew from research on "women's way of knowing" and…

Teachers of English as a Second Language (ESL or L2) are encouraged to design writing prompts with great care and to work through them in detail, considering the wording, the mode of discourse, the rhetorical specifications, and the subject matter of each writing assignment. When confronted with a less clear, less precise prompt, L2 writers may…

This paper intersperses events and experiences from the poet Nikki Giovanni's life--she emerged from the Black Rights Movement in the late 1960s--with student assignments in prereading, reading, discussion, and writing about Giovanni's poetry, specifically the poem "Nikki-Rosa." In addition, the paper describes an oral history project…

Efforts at diversifying and pluralizing curricula in English departments have been under way long enough for many to realize that simply adding a few texts by writers historically omitted will not promote truly broadened learning. A course on "minority literature" (Native-American, Asian-American, African American, and Hispanic) for the…

A first-year composition instructor designed a 3-week unit on folklore that fulfilled a requirement that students produce writing based on field research at some time during the semester. The unit begins with a discussion of the concepts of folklore, folklore genres, and the role that folklore serves in folk and ethnic groups and cultures,…

Five college writing teachers who consider themselves critically and politically progressive were interviewed to see how much their political views influenced what they did in their composition classes. The comments of the teachers suggest that although they are very sensitive to the students' needs and go out of their way to accept diverse views…