Over the last 15 years or so, a variety of culture-based composition pedagogies have claimed to prepare students to take their places as citizens in a postmodern world. Cultural studies pedagogies in particular, because they tend to be grounded in neo-Marxist critical theory traditions, claim to enact democratic principles by preparing students to…

In presenting courses to students, teachers should acknowledge opposition to their educational choices. Discussions of the bases and possible consequences of choices may--and should--lead students to ask for more freedom and more options. Students understand that teachers must evaluate them, so if teachers offer as much leeway as they can,…

Discusses the paradox surrounding freshman English--the recurring tension between, on the one hand, English teachers' desire to make the course teachable and respectable by grounding it in some discipline, and, on the other hand, their attempts to fulfill their supposed responsibility to the culture at large by improving the level of students'…

Creative writing and technical communication are distinct yet similar forms of writing that require time, patience, and disciplined creativity to be effective. Other qualities shared by these two writing forms that should be emphasized in technical writing courses are: (1) effective information sharing, a process that depends on audience analysis,…

Cautions against overemphasizing poor mechanics and overlooking content in writing classes as an overreaction to the problem of deteriorating writing skills. (MKM)

One intention that an instructor had for her new course called "Writing and Healing: Women's Journal Writing" was to make apparent the power of self-written text to transform the writer. She asked her students--women studying women writing their lives and women writing their own lives--to write three pages a day and to focus on change.…

Utilizes genre theory to illuminate issues of debate in theme-based English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pedagogy, including program goals and course design and content. The article argues that EAP instructors cannot teach students skills required for all their future content courses, but can impart strategies to cope with community expectations.…

This paper focuses first on the educator, Ralph W. Tyler, who serves as a model and ideal for curriculum development and implementation. The paper states that in 1949, Tyler, in creating a syllabus, created a small book of 128 pages, and in so doing, he set a benchmark in the field of education. The paper then provides an extended syllabus for a…

Writing across the curriculum involves helping students to learn how to learn by using appropriate parts of the writing process, to understand that certain standards are important if they are to be considered educated, and to ascertain that writing and learning involve similar procedures and methods. At Sinclair Community College, a writing across…

This paper focuses on a course taught by the author/educator in summer 2001, after a challenge from her department head to come up with a strategy to attract graduate students to a Master of Education course in Teaching Writing, a course that had failed to run for the previous five years because of low enrollments. The paper explains that a…

Beginning with the premise that writing cannot be separated from the subject written about, composition teachers should address themselves to what their students are learning in the process of writing. Some writing courses introduce students to great books but those books are usually written only by white men. Others open students to multicultural…

Based on positive findings of previous research with English-as-a-Foreign-Language learners, an integrated reading and writing course for first year Arab EFL students was designed at Beit Berl College, a 4-year teacher training college in Israel.Describes the course objectives, reading and writing requirements, in-class activities, and instructor…

Before undertaking a computer-assisted composition class, several factors should be considered. First, there will be demands on the instructor to replan the entire course to include the effective use of computers; to teach fundamental word-processing skills in addition to writing skills; to develop enough knowledge of hardware and software to…

Outlines elements of instruction--knowledge, information, action--and describes each in the context of writing instruction, reviews writing research, and uses these components of instruction to explore possibilities for automated writing instruction. The Writer's Workbench language analysis programs are used to illustrate major points. Program…

Reviews what has happened in the field of second-language teaching over the past decades and examines the development of the process approach to writing by comparing it with the traditional product approach. A critical evaluation of the new approach follows and forms the premise for recommending a philosophy of eclecticism. (41 references) (CK)