Investigates the discourse practices of the "affiliated professions" of software engineering design. Compares lists of design issues generated by students in computer science and computer communication to lists produced by experts associated with software engineering and by students entering an unaffiliated profession. Suggests that affiliated…

Catherine Prendergast challenges compositionists to investigate how privileging whiteness perpetuates racism in the classroom. In response to Prendergast's challenge, this paper examines the "white ground" of composition classes by complying with Ian Marshall and Wendy Ryan's suggestion to "look closely at how the "politics of…

Over a 2-year period, several teacher book clubs were studied. Teachers' and preservice teachers' responses to a series of texts that focused on multiculturalism in American society were examined. Twelve elementary school teachers, representing four ethnic groups (European American, Asian American, African American, and Hispanic), volunteered to…

Noting that many instructors involved in teaching writing to students of differing cultural backgrounds seek to pinpoint the origin of the differences in communication between the form of written language conveyed to students and that which they use in their everyday language, this paper recommends ethnography to provide evidence as to what is…

A study explored some of the ways that the members of a medical educational institution make sense out of the radical pedagogical innovation taking place in their school. Interviews and focus groups were conducted with members at "MWCOM" (a pseudonym), then data were analyzed according to three primary themes which revolve around how…

A study compared the discourse within a knowledge-building community in dual mediums: face-to-face meetings and electronic mail postings to a discussion list. Participants were faculty members and graduate students at a major university. The study focused on patterns of participation in both mediums, changes in these patterns, and possible effects…

A study analyzed the degree to which an African American verbal tradition (Black English Vernacular) survives in the writing of Black students across a generational time span. A total of 867 essays from the 1984 and the 1988/89 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were subjected to primary trait and holistic scoring analysis, and…

Currently, university composition programs are experimenting with the delivery of online writing courses, without the component of face-to-face interaction. To assess the efficacy of this delivery medium, a study compared two groups of undergraduate students in a course on argumentative writing taught by the same instructor: one group taking the…

A study of the discourse of book reviews in several academic disciplines examines how interaction of text and context varies across disciplines. Sixty academic book reviews in linguistics, chemistry, and economics were analyzed for rhetorical structure and for the communicative goal of the genre, that of evaluating knowledge production. The book…