This study details an innovative approach to coordinating and enhancing multiple levels of assessment and discursive feedback around an existing multi-media curricular environment called Astronomy Village[R]. As part of a broader design-based research programme, the study analysed small group interactions in feedback activities across two design…

Rather than having established forms available to pour things into, forms frequently need to be built from the ground up. Practically, it is simpler to use assembly line production for academic work, and most of academic writing is relatively linear objective prose. However, boundaries are being crossed in diverse disciplines by a number of…

Beliefs about distinct differences between expressive and academic discourse unnecessarily complicate the teaching of writing. A composition pedagogy which fails to attend to the complications arising from the rhetorical aspect of language leads to the promotion of reasoning as separable from context. Reasoning then becomes a skill to be learned…

This paper is designed to extend a dialogue on the nature of explanations to include instructional explanations. The paper explores the distinctions between specific types of explanations, (common, disciplinary, self, and instructional) with respect to specific features (problem type, initiation, evidence, form, and audience). Given this context…

Investigating the relationship between learning and academic journal writing, a study examined features of journal entries and students' characteristics. Subjects, students enrolled in an introductory linguistics course for English, English education, and elementary education, were asked to keep a journal during the course. To determine students'…

A case study examined purpose in the writing of four college freshmen enrolled in a basic composition course. Discourse based interviews were conducted with the subjects before and after they responded to each of three writing tasks designed to provide them with different choices for audience, mode, and focus. The data revealed two central ways in…

Discusses T. Eagleton's view of rhetoric as a study of the political power of discursive practices, comparing it to views of other theorists. Argues that composition faculty should welcome Eagleton's socialist-inflected revival of rhetoric because he embeds it in a deconstruction of the polarities that marginalize writing teachers and empower the…

The term "rhetoric" is the object of a tug-of-war mostly between the study of certain forms of classical discourse and current teachers of (mostly college) writing who want to find a prehistory for their and "our" discipline. Efforts to invent and preserve disciplines have caused scholars to overlook more general considerations…

Reviews college students' compositions describing the acquisition of their literacy skills. Reports that males' anecdotes tend to reflect individual achievement and competition, whereas females' writings display a process and cooperation focus. Argues that new research must be conscious of these differences, or gender-blind studies may be…

Explores Michel Foucault's view of discourse and relates it to the college freshman writing experience. Describes discourse as the aim to expose a fundamental contradiction between the nature of knowledge and the notion of unchanging structures. Compares two student passages to illustrate empowerment within discourse. (KEH)

Discusses and problematizes the notion of education as a transformative experience for students and teachers. Recounts the literacy history of the author. Discusses the ongoing tension in American culture between difference and unity, and how this tension has influenced composition theory and practice. (HB)

Considers the written genres of a group of six children in a first-grade classroom. Reveals the children to be active participants in the social dialogue of their classrooms. Outlines their use of genres and describes where these genres may have come from. (HB)

Examines the major transactions regarding violence during the course of transcribed psychiatric evaluations for 92 recently violent patients. Coded and cross-tabulated the mentioning and action taken for patients describing violence. Findings support a progressive decrease in the discussion of violence and apparent breaches in the flow of…

Investigates whether information abstracts reporting on empirical work possess a predictable discourse-level structure and whether there are lexical clues revealing this structure. Results support the presence of a detectable structure in the text-type of empirical abstracts, which may be of use in a variety of text-based information processing…

Reports findings from a three-year study by a composition researcher and a psychiatrist of the revision of an important mental health book: "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders." Examines the revision using three methodologies. Concludes that the revision functions to achieve certain social and political effects. (HB)