Considers relations between the official pedagogy of the writing program that the author administers and his administrative practices, to come to terms with the hidden curriculum of his situation. Argues for a shift from thinking about administration as masterful organization and implementation to conceiving of it as relational and receptive, a…

Writing 125 is a 13-week course that all first-year students at Wellesley College (Massachusetts) are required to take. One instructor teaches a section of it called "Law in Contemporary Society" which centers writing and reading activities around legal issues, namely "Roe v. Wade" and "Webster v. Cruzan." As an…

Proper placement of students into either remedial writing or Composition I can be crucial to their success in higher education. Using a database of nearly 6,000 students who entered an open admissions community college in Texas, the researchers attempted to discover the best predictor of student success in Composition I. For students who took a…

Sample excerpts from e-mail discussion used in place of the traditional journal in freshman composition illustrate the fascinating issues raised in this new forum. E-mail allows confrontational statements that would not have been made face-to-face and puts in written form a dialogue for analysis by the entire class. A study concentrated on three…

Due to existing demographic trends, language minority students comprise an increasing proportion of students in the Southwest and in urban areas. For these language minority students, the lack of strong writing skills impedes academic performance at the university level and then later in the workplace. To test writing attitudes, a study involved…

It can be very difficult for writers to invent classroom communities, to share their writing; it can be especially difficult for anxious young writers who have never before worked in peer groups. Student participation is largely influenced by gender roles shaped by years of socialization. Teachers should not be startled by less female…

Traditionally, it has been off-limits to talk about failures attributable to the ideology of democratic, student-centered classrooms. However, these classrooms fail for a particular kind of student--the male student who defines himself with a quasi-religious, extremely religious or political stance and who demonstrates strident rejection of…

This collection of essays on Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) defines terms, presents helpful suggestions, and provides models for useful documents (everything from workshop evaluation forms to contracts for visiting consultants). After a preface by Elaine P. Maimon, the collection's 12 essays are: (1) "Writing Across the Curriculum: An…

Writing courses which incorporate the tenets of "critical literacy" (such as the "difference" curriculum at the University of Texas at Austin) not only often fail to make students more aware of the role ideology plays in their culture, but also create profound new silences in the classroom--silences caused by political…

The Houston Community College System has adapted off-campus freshman composition courses to meet the needs of non-traditional college students. The program offers both college option classes for high school seniors, and business, industrial or professional classes for older students. Although there are some problems inherent in both the college…

The conventional nature of school-sponsored writing, in which writing becomes a formal operant within the closed space of classroom signifying practices, is one in which the feminine mode of expression often announces it cannot play. While the masculine style of peer-response to student writing is largely aggressive, the feminine is conceptually…

Reflecting new development in the field of rhetoric and composition, this textbook's third edition incorporates major changes which propose to turn theory into practical advice. These additions in the third edition draw on a new theoretical understanding of how writers operate within a discourse community, on a new research-based view of the…

A study focused on teaching students to write effectively in time-pressure situations, particularly on essay exams. Thirteen sections of freshman composition (205 students) were divided into two treatment groups. Half of the classes completed the exam-taking unit in a standard freshman text. The other half of the classes worked through an inquiry…

Using electronic mail (E-mail), the instructor of a master's level drama class at a Finnish university and an introductory literature instructor at Indiana University-Perdue University at Indianapolis communicated between themselves and served as intermediaries for communication between two groups of their students. While instructional levels and…

Language interference (which was originally posited in ESL theory) involves ways in which language learners draw upon previous language experiences to fill holes in their knowledge of a second language they are learning. Since the 1970s, language interference has been a part of the pedagogy of basic writing, concerning itself with ways that basic…