Describes an experiment designed to determine the reaction of employment interviewers to local lexical and syntactic errors in business and technical writing of non-native speakers of English. Reports that these judges find local syntactic errors more serious than local lexical errors. (MM)

Reappraises conventional distinctions between oral-like and literate-like discourse, particularly Tannen's distinction between involvement focus and message focus. Treats message as an embodiment of involvement, and cohesion as an aspect of a developing writer-reader relationship. Offers speculations for rethinking "literate…

Assesses the broad, measurable effects of using computers to teach introductory college composition, collecting data from 24 classes. Finds that students using computers revise and improve their posttest essays at significantly better levels than students writing with pen and paper. (SR)

Overviews basic writing instruction and research by briefly discussing the history of remediation, results of a survey of basic writing programs in U.S. colleges and universities, and interviews with developmental textbook editors at major publishing houses. Finds that basic writing instruction continues to focus on sentence grammar. (MM)

Studies secondary school classrooms in Great Britain and the United States, revealing that, when teachers apply similar theories to everyday practice, important pedagogical contrasts illustrate the ways in which instruction is organized and in what students produce. Finds that, in classrooms with the most highly involved interactions, students…

Evaluates and analyzes four recent theoretical and pedagogical books concerned with writing portfolios for teachers of writing. Discusses various issues and theoretical concerns of practitioners advocating the use of portfolios. (HB)

Provides discussion and critical analysis of the "dog days" of part-time writing instructors in today's academic world. Compares student writing and teacher evaluation of that writing at vastly different colleges at which the same instructor taught. Considers how teacher attitudes are swayed by institutional setting. (HB)

Provides an overview of the conversational roles taken on by students and teachers during college-level writing conferences. Uses the performative theory of Erving Goffman to analyze these role patterns. Illuminates the specific performative demands presented by writing conferences on both students and teachers. (HB)

Outlines a text-based, interactionist approach toward writing and written communication. A brief analysis of the working drafts and revisions of a first-year college student's essay is offered to illustrate how key textual features function reflexively to establish and sustain the evolving but mutually held rational grounds of school writing and…

Describes how, in a second-/third-grade classroom, and in the context of writing workshop, another kind of community developed--an informal but long-lasting "writing club" with eight core members who worked collaboratively and developed a story topic that became the dominant story topic pattern throughout the remainder of the school year. (SR)

Finds that the writing system and the reading system share many of the same orthographic, phonological, and working memory subprocesses but that the patterns of concurrent relationship between these subprocesses and writing and between these subprocesses and reading differ. Suggests that writing and reading draw upon the same as well as unique…

Investigates writing skills learned in a low socioeconomic status, urban, primary, whole-language classroom. Finds that the children became more fluent writers who used more complex sentences, but the surface level skills used for some purposes did not become automatic. Suggests that some children need more opportunities for editing and…

Presents the responses of several well-known scholars--David Bloome, Joanne M. Golden, Carol D. Lee, Susan Hynds, Michael Pressley, and Timothy Shanahan--to Alan C. Purves's criticism of educational research in the English language arts for its redundancy, its staleness, its reliance on jargon and labels, and its flawed methodology. (TB)

Describes the philosophical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and argues that his insights can greatly inform contemporary composition theory. Discusses how phenomenology affects both design and analysis in composition research. (HB)

Explores the reading-writing relationship using control and treatment groups from two separate populations--college remedial readers and sixth graders. Finds a significant increase in reading comprehension and a significant decrease in writing errors for the sixth grade experimental group and an improvement in writing complexity in the college…