Teachers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and academic language and learning advisors have long recognised the importance of developing students' academic vocabulary for successful writing and learning at university. There is little, however, in the EAP literature on the place of teaching and learning discipline specific vocabulary, despite…

Writing needs to be given adequate emphasis in the area of social studies. Teachers should attempt to be creative and to assign different kinds of writing in their classes. This paper discusses possible activities for students in a unit on the Middle East to illustrate diverse purposes in writing. An initial assignment could be to ask students to…

Students should use words (their own words) to learn physics,and that is why it is important for students learning introductory physics to write as they learn. To teach physics badly, teach it as a bunch of equations with no underlying meaning, or make it scary and nearly incomprehensible. Physics is really about subtle ideas and concepts--it is…

Writing centers and their faculty are often considered to be "Others" because they have both power and no power--they have the ability to make a difference in students' writing abilities, but they are often excluded because they are seen as a "fixit," a clinic, a lab, an ancillary. Writing center faculty need to take more power so that they can…

Mathematics faculty around the United States are using writing assignments in a variety of ways. A mathematics teacher at Alma College, Michigan, has students write mathematical autobiographies, keep a reading logbook, and write letters to other students about the course, letters to instructors about the topics, or about what they do not…

Examination of the different types of courses and course materials can help identify the parameters and configurations of advanced composition. While usually referring to nonfiction writing, courses labeled "advanced composition" range from expository and narrative nonfiction through fiction and poetry. They also include legal and…

Reader-response criticism may elucidate the relationship between reading and knowing. Unfortunately, discussions of stylistics and convention in anthologies of reader response criticism tend to focus on fairly specialized literary problems. David Bleich's subjective paradigm provides a framework through which the study of both response and…

This 44-item, annotated bibliography provides an overview of the major viewpoints and methods in current technical writing practice and instruction. It is intended for instructors, students, and managers of engineering firms. Entries are presented in three categories. The first category (8 entries)) focuses on the requirements for technical…

Asks what can an advanced composition course offer its students that is both new and valuable to all of them despite the diversity of students' fields and career goals? Argues that job-related writing requires special attention to audience. Suggests ways to organize course content to develop audience awareness. (JG)

Asserts that the conventions of academic writing are not obvious to faculty, and must be even more mysterious to students. It is therefore properly the business of the academy to teach the academy's forms of writing. (MS)

Identifies and examines six proposal writing subgoals to help students understand not only what they need to do but how they need to do it. Suggests that, by showing students several examples of each goal, they will be able to revise to meet these goals in later documents. (MS)

Constructs industry-related writing assignments for students of chemical engineering to simulate communication tasks they will face as professionals. (MS)

States that writing can help bring more content into the classroom and identifies resources for this purpose. Included are citations and brief abstracts for three journal articles and two ERIC documents which address writing in the social studies classroom. (JDH)

Students in a treatment group turned in written summaries of eight lectures, which were returned with chemistry and writing mistakes noted. Although achievement gains were found, results may have been due to the processes involve in organizing/writing the summaries or to the additional time required to complete the assignments. (JN)

A project for Writing Across the Curriculum at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire is described as a method to relate the process of writing to the process of learning hydrology. The project focuses on an actual groundwater contamination case and is designed to improve the technical writing skills of students. (JN)