Argues that students' attitudes about authorship and intellectual property rights are evidence of cultural habits of mind. Overviews perceptions of literary products as public and/or private property. Explores conflicts in legal notions of textual ownership relating to copyrights and the idea/expression dichotomy in American Constitutional law.…

Presents a functional grammatical analysis of the writing that 128 seventh- and eighth-grade students produced in response to their science teacher's directive to describe a picture. Identifies the register elements of the task and the grammatical difficulties it posed for students. Shows that teachers can help students use grammatical resources…

Examines audience-centered writing strategies in two early sewing machine manuals. Considers the difference between non-sexist and gender-neutral writing. Concludes that avoiding sexism in technical writing may sometimes be impossible. (PA)

Uses case studies to address the tendency of second language (L2) writing instruction and research to overlook the voices or identities already possessed by L2 writers. Examines the role voice can play as a means for investigating and understanding the voice-related issues mature writers encounter in L2 contexts. (Author/VWL)

Examines gender influences and roles in a language arts classroom. Finds a bias for tales of adventure outside the realm of everyday concerns, which silences the voices of girls and some boys. Argues that the concept of an engaging story should be enlarged to include stories of cooperation and connection, and to embrace both the everyday and the…

Examines the history of science from the perspective of metaphor. Suggests that there are few differences between the literal and the metaphorical in scientific discourse. States that the central role of metaphors in science seems to ensure that science is open-ended, suggesting that conceptions of reality will be open to change and…

Discusses the theory of multiple intelligences and what it tells English teachers about students' writing processes. Discusses results of a study of the writing processes of 10 high school juniors whose cognitive profile featured visual-spatial intelligence and subordinated linguistic aspects. Discusses the importance of matching instructional…

Examines the prose versions of Shakespeare plays written for children by Charles and Mary Lamb, Bernard Miles, and Leon Garfield. Suggests that the content ranges far from Shakespeare's originals and promotes values that should be questioned critically. (TB)

Categorizes students' self-selected topics in a state writing assessment. Finds that fifth graders chose "animals"; eighth graders chose "sports"; high-school students chose "social problems" and "sports" until twelfth grade, when "school/learning" issues replaced "sports." (RS)

Presents a correlation study of student satisfaction with Writing Center services based on the number of visits students made to the Center during two different semesters. Tells a story of how the writing center staff learned to stop fearing numbers and love the interpretation of them. Finds no statistically significant correlation between number…

Considers the importance of materials from popular culture in children's literate activities. Emphasizes the dynamic ways in which children adapt symbols from popular culture for their own academic and social purposes. Argues for the need to view popular culture more respectfully. (NH)

Demonstrates that two fifth-grade avid writers differentiated between flow experiences and non-flow experiences associated with writing, and describes flow experiences in terms similar to those reported in studies in adolescents and adults. Shows that flow experiences occurred when students controlled important aspects of writing, such as…

Investigated university students' beliefs about themselves as writers and about the experience of learning in writing as related to writing approaches measured by the Inventory of Processes in College Composition. Found support for the deep and surface paradigm, and variation in students' conceptions of writing, attitudes about themselves as…

This intellectual history of the disciplinary roots of second language (L2) writing research and pedagogy in English examines the influences of its feeder disciplines, composition studies and applied linguistics, and their parent disciplines, rhetoric and linguistics. After a brief history of L2 writing's two grandparent disciplines (rhetoric and…

Studies investigating cultural influences on second-language writing have been mainly product-oriented. Moreover, research on writing processes has mostly focused on the strategies of writing and learning to write. Writing processes where we can see the evolution of the writer's identity and beliefs have been less adequately addressed. Therefore,…