The history, culture and practices of Central America are inadequately addressed in teacher preparation and professional development across the United States, and especially in California based on the author's analysis of teacher preparation. Information about the histories, cultures and practices add to the linguistic and pedagogic knowledge-base…

This article reports the results of a preliminary study that applied a randomized posttest-only design to evaluate the effectiveness of a literacy curriculum that incorporated explicit opportunities for Spanish-speaking Head Start preschool children (N = 76) to develop writing abilities in English. The study also addressed English language…

Globalization and domestic competition are forcing businesses to rethink the human resources utilization process, and one method for considering again this challenge is creating a team culture. One key to this process for human resources development is the understanding of how to create the most successful teams. The use of the Myers-Briggs Type…

High-stakes tests have been employed widely to engineer curriculum innovation, or achieve intended washback in education. But our understanding of the role of high-stakes tests as an agent for change is limited due to the small number of empirical studies available on this issue. This paper reports on a washback study which focuses on the writing…

The phenomenon of overused adjectives by non-native speaking learners (NNS) has been pinpointed by recent research. This study designed five online units for increasing students' awareness of underused specific adjectives for EFL college writing. Five units were developed for five identified overused adjectives: "important", "beautiful", "hard",…

The spin on Frazer School Librarian Laurie LeFever's entry for Syracuse University's 2007 E*LIT competition is what made her school literacy project for children with disabilities really unique. Instead of working with students to create a project that would be targeted toward children with disabilities, she actually used students with…

There is a growing movement within the field of "rhetoric and composition" to separate the more theoretical, abstract, and prestigious rhetoric from the more practical composition. Evidence cannot irrefutably prove that professionalization is creating an opposition between the two elements of the discipline with a privileging of rhetoric, but…

In composition journals, graduate classrooms, and informal discussions among writing teachers, there is a lot of talk about liberation, empowerment, student voice, dialogue, critical thinking, and democratic teaching--the familiar tropology of critical pedagogy. This nomenclature seems to have permeated the field of composition, across theoretical…

This magazine contains literary pieces/writings by 31 new writers in the southeastern United States. The works span a broad range of topics: remembering times past, reflections on special people, social concerns, family life, and work. Authors' comments or autobiographical notes and photographs accompany the pieces. Titles include the following:…

Noting that within the area of literacy, writing is a young area of study, this research report looks at the impact of the national Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy's 10 years of sustained research. The paper first considers how Center research projects and activities have been tied together to address three interlocking sets of…

One teacher's experience suggests that interpretive writing stemming from the reading and discussion of a literary work, in a second language, promotes development of higher-level cognitive skills. College students in an upper-division Spanish course in one institution are engaged in a writing process with three phases: preparatory; interpretive;…

The book is an introduction to the field of contrastive rhetoric, an area of research in second language learning that identifies learners' problems in composition and attempts to explain them by referring to the rhetorical strategies of the first language. It traces the history of contrastive approaches to the study of second language writing and…

The western intellectual tradition promotes a unique style of thinking and writing that cannot readily embrace other ways of understanding human experience and communicating about it. Three fundamental differences in the ways east and west approach oral and written communication and the thinking that lies behind it are: first, a preference for…

Writing centers are one place where expert-novice interactions are likely to occur. Students often assume that tutors possess expertise by virtue of their appointment as tutors. The tutor, for his/her part, often assumes that the student's knowledge is deficient in the area in which the student is seeking advice. The complex interactional and…

Based on the idea that to beat the competition and impress college admissions officers a student must write a first-rate college application, this guide provides easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions for applications that get results. The guide contains worksheets, checklists, and examples that will help the student in the admissions process.…