Seniors submitted and revised essays within ePortfolios for evaluation by high school faculty and university first-year writing instructors. The project also examined differences between high school and college teachers' responses and effects on students' assumptions about the writing expected and valued in college. Results suggest techniques…

Trickster tales, with their teachings on how to behave in the world, are a powerful means for transmitting social knowledge and cultural mores to children. In this study we compared two approaches to teaching fourth-grade students to write trickster tales. Although both instructional methods incorporated aspects of the writing process approach,…

This article presents two interview strategies used to assess college students' developmental growth toward self-authorship. We illustrate that self-authorship is a foundation for achieving many college learning outcomes and argue that designing practice to promote self-authorship requires understanding how to assess it. We offer a brief overview…

In this article we propose, theorize, demonstrate, and report early results from a course that approaches first-year composition as introduction to Writing Studies. This pedagogy explicitly recognizes the impossibility of teaching a universal academic discourse and rejects that as a goal for first-year composition. It seeks instead to improve…

Designed to help teachers develop a collaborative writing community in the intermediate grade classroom, this teacher's resource and support package gives teachers what they need to apply process writing principles to five of the most popular student writing forms or genres ("memorable moments,""interesting…

Explains how a teacher teaches process writing in her mainstream high school classes, despite her obligation to cover grammar, literature, vocabulary, research, and communication. Shows how some approaches to process writing can be modified to fit it into a tighter, more structured course. (TB)

Provides discussion and critical analysis of three key models for teaching freshman composition courses. Discusses approaches centered on writing as product, writing as process, and writing as system. Considers what might be the common ground that these three approaches to writing instruction share. (HB)

Asserts that writing assessment should reflect current composition pedagogy, and offers a design to assess process writing. Discusses the development of the scoring criteria and the selection of range finders, as well as the standardization of training and scoring procedures. (PRA)

Describes a CD-ROM adventure story written by the author to educate her students about the word relationships of synonyms and antonyms. Discusses how this interactive medium put a different twist on each of the stages of the writing process itself. Relates how two students enthusiastically used the program, and were inspired to write one of their…

Draws on the work of three students to argue for the value of treating writing as a tool for knowledge building. Claims when writing is used in this way, (1) students extend their repertoire of writing strategies, and (2) the effort students put into creating functionally effective texts plays a role in their learning. (NH)

This instructional note describes the process of rotating teacher participation in peer workshop groups and how this practice can enhance the workshop group dynamics, ease instructors' grading loads, and improve the level of peer feedback and draft revision in composition courses. (Contains 1 end note.)

This article provides 10 reasons why it is important to do critical media analysis in the second language classroom and describes how a process-writing approach can be used for this in a university writing class. The authors explain how to prepare a lesson plan and the idea of an "Adbuster." They then describe 10 stages in the lesson…

This action research study evaluates a classroom approach incorporating a reflective, metacognitive component within a second language process-oriented writing environment. Inspired by the literature and developed by the first author, this approach seeks to provide English language learners (ELLs) with a command of metalinguistic principles…

Peter Medway recounts the beginnings of the language across the curriculum (LAC) movement in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s when teachers were troubled by their encounters with bright but non-academic working-class children who failed in school and yet whose verbal resourcefulness and fertility were an inescapable fact. Thus teachers were led to…

Like the narrator of Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall," instructors need to ask what is being walled in and walled out of their composition programs when categories such as process vs. product, expressive, epistemic, current traditionalism, and social constructionism are constructed. When divisive categories prevent theorists from…