Examines both the early and recent periods of the history as it has been written for both English education and first-year composition. Argues that those accounts show consistently converging trajectories of disciplinary practice in both areas. Proposes that writing teacher educators should actively consider reconfiguring their shared discipline…

This article describes the interpretive paraphrase class workshop method, which emphasizes dialogue as a centerpiece of the composing process and provides students with opportunities to re-envision their compositions based on the alternative readings of their peers. A major goal of this writing workshop is to create and sustain student-talk about…

There are not many English words for "anger." There's "wrath" and "ire," although no one uses "ire" anymore and hardly anyone "wrath." There's "frustration," "resentment," and "indignation," but they don't have the emotional intensity of "anger," a word that…

Introducing Web-based literary hypertexts in an introductory writing course motivates students to ponder both the changing techniques of writing and reading and their own attitudes toward these two interrelated activities in a wholly new way. Evaluating a novice literature launches novice readers and writers on a journey to becoming "experts" at…

Increasing numbers of ESL (English as a Second Language) students are entering college and university programs, and educators in these programs are concerned about student preparedness. ESL students enter the post-secondary system from a variety of places, resulting in a lack of uniformity in entry level academic skills. A significant associated…

A case study on the teaching of writing, this paper discusses what motivates students in a freshman writing course to complete increasingly difficult writing assignments. The study provides a glimpse into how one class of freshman students developed positive expectations for writing a paper about a difficult poem by helping each other map…

A composition scholar conducted a study of peer response groups in a freshmen composition course to determine what leads to conflict among students in these groups. In the course of her study, however, she found herself deeply perplexed by conflicting roles she had to play as a participant/observer. The ethnographer as a participant/observer is,…

Although socio-cultural awareness is an important element of discourse, freshman composition's primary obligation is to provide students with instruction in and practice "owning" a process of writing that foregrounds writing as a rhetorical art. Students should leave the course more aware of and better able to employ powerful, flexible…

As current scholarship in composition is becoming increasingly influenced by post-structuralist theories of discourse, two approaches to teaching freshman composition compete with one another. At the heart of the controversy lies the question of the place of academic discourse in this pedagogy. The social constructionist approach (supported by…

At Utica College, Anthropology 101 seeks to help students begin to detect ethnocentrism in themselves and others, to get an understanding of the varieties of cultural systems, and to see their own society as simply one example of shapes a society can take. An "ethnography project" is a useful device in advancing these goals. Students are…

The freshmen writing faculty at DePaul University (Illinois) was comprised of 10 female non-tenure track instructors in the spring term of 1990. The core program for freshmen taking the introductory writing course pairs the English course with a history course, thus combining a study of civilization with a study of writing and rhetoric, and…

Mikhail Bakhtin's literary theory, particularly his voice-oriented term, "heteroglossia," can easily be brought to bear on the teaching of voice in the composition classroom. Bakhtin not only likes the concept of voice, but at times even seems obsessed with it. The notion of heteroglossia suggests a diversity of discourses or voices, and…

As the issue of whether literature might be used to teach composition has not been a lively issue of debate among current scholars, those interested in the topic might look to George Jardine, professor of logic and philosophy at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, from 1774 to 1824. As Robert Connors suggests, teachers stand to gain much by…

What the instructor of freshman composition might reasonably hope for at the end of the semester is that his or her students have advanced sufficiently in their self-critical attitudes so as to approach future writing challenges with some sense of hope. To borrow Russell A. Hunt's metaphor, freshmen might at least learn to strive toward opening…

At the Lake Campus of Wright State University, students are required to complete two courses in English composition. In the second, English 102, the focal assignment is an eight- to ten-page research essay, typically with either an argumentative slant or a topic that requires some sort of interpretive analysis. When the department selected an…