Two studies with a total of 82 students (grades 5-7) with learning disabilities found that, unaided, students corrected 9% of their errors; with spelling checkers, they corrected 37% of errors. Spelling checkers failed to identify about 30% of errors. Students usually selected the correct word from spelling checker suggestions. (Author/DB)

Discusses changes in feminist theory as well as struggles pertaining to Canadian multiculturalism and antiracism. The article focuses on an advanced-level writing class in Canadian culture consisting mostly of women students with an interest in soap operas, who focused in the class on what personal histories were evoked in watching these programs.…

Discusses characteristics of lifetime writers: seeing writing's purpose, initiating writing, expressing their own voice, and working well alone. Teachers can encourage this behavior by demonstrating writing, allowing time and choice, using writing skills frequently, demonstrating writing conventions, expecting more, and responding to writing. (SM)

Tells a number of stories about young people, including the author's own children, who find a second chance through two-year community colleges. Touts community colleges as one of the few places in this increasingly stratified society where persons of various ages and from a variety of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds come together.…

Presents a pedagogy for teaching writing students a theory of interlocutor relationships in synchronous computer conferencing (SCC), also known as chat. Constructs four major categories of interlocutor relationships: agonistic, hierarchical, dialectical, and empathic relationships. Argues application of this rhetorical theory provides students and…

Points to scholarship that helped the authors think about the ideologies behind Writing Spaces, a Web-based site for computer-mediated communication that they constructed using Perl scripts. Argues that writing teachers can and should shape online spaces to facilitate their individual pedagogies rather than allowing commercial software to limit…

Examines Listserv, a package for distributing email to a group of subscribers for the purpose of discussion. Notes the popularity of listservs among teachers and scholars in computers and composition. Suggests few users are aware of constraints the software places on the rhetorical situation. Explains how a Listserv is configured, decisions list…

Notes that the Center for English Studies Technology (CEST) at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa has sponsored several projects that bring together literacy, computer-mediated communication, and community-service learning. Concludes that community-service learning projects can be used to further pedagogical goals for technology-intensive writing…

This article reports on use of an e-mail-based correspondence program with South African peers to facilitate the writing skills and motivation of six U.S. sixth graders with language/learning disabilities. Focusing on one child's experience, it describes the writing-process instructional approach and the positive effects on the student's writing…

Advocates a concordance- and genre-based approach to academic essay writing for non-native students. Describes a project that aimed to teach undergraduate law students to write formal legal essays. Students identified structural characteristics and used concordances to explore possible correlations between the generic structures and particular…

Grice's maxims, which define the conditions for efficient spoken communications, can be adapted to the teaching of writing by providing both teachers and writers with a way of understanding successful and unsuccessful written correspondence in mono- and cross-cultural settings. Cultural differences are revealed in a survey of lay readers'…

Studied eight teachers struggling to implement an innovation in teaching English writing in the Hong Kong schools and developed a model for the Innovation-Decision process based on that of E. Rogers (1995). Findings provide a theoretical framework and principles for designing in-service programs for teachers adjusting to educational change. (SLD)

Discusses how certain strategies can enable successful chat rooms in academic courses. Examines some of the author's own pedagogical trials, errors, and successes with chat rooms. Offers some strategies for conducting effective participation among students in such settings. Discusses several models of teacher-student interaction for developing the…

Examines four first-graders' messages to family members in their "family message journals," as students were learning to "do science." Finds that they consistently composed texts in which they appropriated the linguistic conventions of science and that they seemed able to use these conventions flexibly, recontextualizing the…

Reports an investigation of 35 nonnative English speaking students' native language writing experiences and their native writing instruction. Findings indicate that composition teachers can benefit from students' insights and perspectives in tailoring instruction, incorporating students' perspectives and preferred learning styles in preparing them…