A student's participation on two listserves added new depth and new complexities to her overall learning process. The listserves (one just for her composition class at California State University San Bernardino and one that linked her class to two other composition classes at distant universities) created a community of people who had access to a…

National Board of Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) certification offers experienced teachers opportunities via written portfolios to match their practice to NBPTS standards. In creating standards and requiring teachers to argue in writing that they have realized the standards in their teaching, NBPTS offers a national discourse. However,…

In writing, as in conversation, there are implicit boundaries which separate various modes of communication, and these boundaries cause exclusion, discomfort, and misunderstanding. The existence of these boundaries results in a number of issues, such as the categorization of texts, the differences between writing for English classes and writing in…

The concept of genre should not be limited to literary genres, but should be expanded to include all types of texts, including those traditionally considered to be nonliterary. Essentially, many things about writing work the way they do because of genre, and a better understanding of genre can give us a better understanding of writing, reading and…

The persistent cultural conservatism in Western scholarship has led to the exclusion of Chinese rhetoric from the canon of rhetorical studies. However, the assumption that Chinese culture does not have a rhetorical tradition is misleading and inappropriate. It stems from any number of notions: that the Chinese language is not as logical as those…

While the debate over the role of metaphor in language, thought, and meaning is not new, in the past decade there has been a move among organizational scholars to use metaphors in critical research. This paper presents a review of one area of the existing literature on metaphor--that dealing primarily with the nonliteral view of metaphors within…

A study examined a segment of classroom discourse in light of: (1) the complexity of an I-R-E (Initiation-Reply-Evaluation) sequence; (2) the teacher's role as facilitator; and (3) the similarities and differences between mundane conversation and classroom discourse. In addition, the intricacies of interaction between teachers and students in the…

Noting that many instructors involved in teaching writing to students of differing cultural backgrounds seek to pinpoint the origin of the differences in communication between the form of written language conveyed to students and that which they use in their everyday language, this paper recommends ethnography to provide evidence as to what is…

Raymond William's historical analysis of the "community" and the "individual" is useful for looking critically at the notion of "discourse communities." Recent "social" theories of writing have invoked the idea of community in ways that seem at once sweeping and vague, for they fail to state the operating…

The determiners in English include three categories: predeterminers, central determiners, and postdeterminers. The focus of the present study is the central determiners because they comprise the largest group and because a minimum of one central determiner is required in the generation of any noun phrase. Furthermore, the central determiners have…

This paper aims to show how its author/researchers were brought to reconsider some of the assumptions behind a small arc project that was being conducted on the professional development of student teachers in Australia. A small group of English Method students were invited to participate in three focus group interviews: before their first teaching…

In January 2004, college students from postsecondary institutions across Wisconsin were invited to join US Representatives Tammy Baldwin and Mark Green at The Johnson Foundation's Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin. The purpose of the discussion was to engage students' attitudes regarding politics, and their understanding of…

This paper focuses on the efforts at Gardner-Webb University in North Carolina to extend the writing efforts of a writing across the curriculum (WAC) retreat into a greater matrix of scholarly activity, not only in the classroom but outside as well. Noting that the initial idea was that an intensive year of emphasizing scholastic activity could…

A female African American educator with dreadlocks in a class of predominantly white college students begins each semester by warning students that the terms "black" and "white" will be used regularly. She also points out factors that might inhibit speaking in class, such as white students' fears that awkward phrasing of their…

A study sought to explore and define the nature of gendered religious socialization in a non-denominational Christian school, using the lens of submission theology. Many Christian schools today are less rigid in their rules and doctrines than formerly and are no longer separate from the world. This study was conducted in one such school, where a…