While "internationalization" has become a buzzword in composition scholarship and teaching, our discourses tend toward fuzzy uses and understandings of the term and its multiple implications. We tend to focus on how our U.S. experience is being internationalized: how English and its teaching are spreading; how other countries, different…

A study surveyed and synthesized available information about the employment and earnings of authors over the 1970-1990 period. Data came from United States and other government censuses, a variety of surveys of authors, and from records of writers' unions and professional organizations. Results indicated that: (1) the author occupation is growing…

In the mid-1960s, social scientists Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss developed grounded theory as a systematic and rigorous method of qualitative data analysis leading to "the discovery of theory from data." In grounded theory, the researcher applies a set of coding procedures to the data until a provisional theory emerges inductively.…

Suggesting that, as a field of research, reading-writing relationship is still in its infancy, this paper examines how the field has developed over time and where it is currently heading. Using different decades (beginning with the 1960s) as a guiding time frame, the paper (1) delineates major shifts in the conception of reading and writing, and…

A study determined the effectiveness of two computer-assisted programs for writing/language instruction. Three first-grade classes and three second-grade classes at each of five Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools (CMS) were selected for the study. Two schools were using Write to Read for the first time, two schools were using Acceleration Station 2000…

A study examined the effect of computer-assested instruction on fourth graders' writing skills. Two fourth grade classes from one elementary school in New Jersey participated in the study. One class (the experimental sample) was taught to use the computer as a writing tool, while the other class (the control sample) used only pencil and paper.…

Even though increasing numbers of blind students have been attending schools and colleges, little research has appeared specifically on the writing processes of blind writers. This paper presents a case study which developed a preliminary process account of the composing techniques of a blind executive who administers a medium-sized social service…

During interviews conducted with Janet Emig, the true identity of "Lynn," the primary subject of Emig's influential 1971 monograph "The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders," was determined. Discovery of Susan Gzech's true identity led to an interview which shed some interesting light on Emig's case study and on composition…

Four composition teachers (two adjunct and two full-time faculty members at a large midwestern urban university) with a combined 80 years teaching experience were interviewed concerning how they perceive and use theory in the classroom. Questions focused on three areas: what theories guided them in teaching composition; what they felt the trends…

Kenneth Burke suggests that language operates from ultimate motives centered around "god-terms" through terministic screens. God-terms represent the strongest terministic screens in any culture: they screen attention to selected realities while screening or deflecting away others. A model of composition can be constructed from these…

Despite the stereotype of today's undergraduates as having an inadequate literacy level, a teacher of English at a large midwestern university was surprised to find that students' literacy autobiographies reflect what might be called a conventional literacy success story, one that represents a strain of American autobiography dating back to…

An ethnographic study examined the impact of a writing workshop on non-academic writers. Subjects, 11 adult non-academic writers who wrote little, were seldom around others who did, and did not think they were good writers, participated in 10 Saturday sessions conducted in a bookstore in a rural town. They wrote narratives on self-selected topics…

Using interviews in a longitudinal study can be a productive way to gain insights into various factors that play a part in how students view their experiences as they make transitions into a university and across various contexts for writing. During the first three semesters of a study, 312 interviews were conducted with students, beginning when…

A doctoral student's interest in self-culture connections led her to observe an English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) writing class focused on autobiography and read all the students' papers. Autobiographical writing not only gives ESL students a chance to write about what matters to them, but the teacher can capitalize on students' cultural…

A study examined college freshmen management students' views about the social implications for their writing in terms of themselves as writers, the way they view their audience and their audience's reaction to their writing, and about the actual text itself. Seven self-selected students in the management class were interviewed after each of three…