Presents a research agenda for examining learners' and teachers' conceptions of computers, language, and writing and their relations to one another. Claims that theories of computer usage are connected to notions of language and writing. Provides a theoretical foundation for proceeding with needed research. (HB)

Describes an approach to teaching a literature-based first-year composition course that allows students to read poetry and understand it, which in turn helps them to become better writers. Outlines class activities and writing assignments that foster independent thinking and personal writing, finally leading to essays. (HB)

Describes a writing assignment in which students think about how their families celebrate their own cultures through special meals or a certain dish, find out how this dish became part of their rituals, write a brief summary of the history of the dish, and write up the recipe itself. (SR)

Revisits the historical contours of the debate over the need for and role of the required first-year course in writing. Argues for the value of the required course in composition as a pedagogical site with the potential to influence large of numbers of students, and for its importance as a site of struggle within the institutional hierarchy of…

Argues that the "failure" of traditional writing instruction is actually its success, protecting the elite and maintaining inequality, which requires mass failure and illiteracy to preserve the unequal hierarchies now in place. Argues that bogus testing should be eliminated, basic writing mainstreamed into an expanded and untracked form of…

Argues for having first-year composition students "publish" electronic portfolios on the World Wide Web. Provides background on attaining a computer-mediated pedagogy that accounts for its electronic presence and transcends traditional classroom practice. Presents an actual electronic portfolio. Concludes that making an electronic…

Concentrates specifically on the experience of using "Maus" (a narrative in comic strip form) with one class which met in spring 1996, after the accidental killing of a Black child by a Hasidic Jew in Crown Heights, New York. Uses the text at Medgar Evers College in a freshman composition course which also functions as an introduction to…

Details a first-year college composition course that blends journalism instruction with first-year composition. Describes how students learn about news gathering and news writing techniques common to feature writing and complete a profile writing project which encourages a level of discourse that bears closer kinship to everyday workplace writing.…

Presents a conversation between the teacher of a first-year college composition course and a high school English/language arts teacher regarding what they do in the college composition course. Offers students' insights and suggestions about how they might most effectively be prepared for such a course. (SR)

Advocates using debate with F.R. Stockton's "The Lady, or the Tiger" to sharpen critical skills in literary interpretation. Poses a series of questions at five-minute intervals and sets up an affirmative and a negative side on which students debate the next day. Suggests also debating on literary values, an author's intentions, etc. (PA)

Argues that students are more motivated and develop more effective skills if challenged with assignments that ask for the depth of thinking required of academic disciplines and careers. Encourages composition teachers to experiment with assignments that challenge assumptions about first-year students' capabilities. (SG)

Describes an ethnographic study of a first-year writing classroom focusing on narrative's role in that particular classroom culture at a mid-size state university. Argues for narrative's constitutive and epistemic value in a writing classroom and for the autobiographical anecdote in particular as a bridge between teaching and learning. (SC)

Presents an educational case study in which an English-as-a-Second-Language student brings a draft of his argument essay for freshman composition to a tutor in a university writing center. Presents a response that examines several ways in which the study has challenged an educator to think more deeply about beliefs. (SG)

English 116: Freshman Seminar is, according to the college catalog, the "gateway course for North Central College's integrative curriculum. [It f]ocuses on writing, reading, and critical thinking related to a specific area of inquiry [and is t]eam-taught by faculty from English and another department. Topics vary, but emphasis is on rhetoric…

During the 1994 fall semester, an instructor taught an English 101 section at Central Arizona College-Superstition Mountain Campus that used readings from Graham Flegg's "Numbers: Their History and Meaning" as the basis for 3 of the assigned readings. Only 3 of the 5 assigned essays were based on math--as opposed to all of them--for…