The countries that make up the Middle East have intersecting though distinct and internally complex historical, economic, and linguistic histories. Disparate colonial histories and postcolonial legacies, the religious and socio-political positioning of Arabic as a regional language, and the influences of globalization and translanguaging create…

Shows how microethnography can be an effective tool for analyzing the possibilities and constraints of electronic discourse by overviewing two electronic mail ethnography projects. Suggests that such approaches can help students better understand electronic rhetoric as well as electronic ideology (the power relationships and cultural values that…

When composition educators talk about either "theory" or "practice," they are not referring to a monolithic and unified field, but instead to any number of competing, ideologically charged metacommentaries. The "problem with practice" refers to its own socially complex and temporally diffuse nature. Applications of…

John Swales, well-known proponent and definer of genre theory, sees the writing process as recursive as well as heuristic, emphasizing that the text is created by a writer, who is a member of a discourse community, influenced by that community's traditions, discourse conventions, textual and topic requirements and constraints. Debate among genre…

Teachers' written responses to student writing cover a wide range, and through the kind and amount of response, they convey their values, beliefs, and priorities about language and learning, about the roles of teacher and student, and about the goals of writing. Researchers have found that students respond well to comments on concepts and…

This report describes the development of a learning community in a fifth-grade writers' workshop across one school year and two girls' participation in the learning community. The report examines ways in which teacher-researchers' and students' notions and actions regarding collaboration changed; it also describes the curriculum in the writers'…

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…

Presents a case study of a fourth-grade student who learned to participate in the literacy community of her classroom by writing letters. Claims that letter writing aided this student in gaining confidence and skill. Discusses implications of this study for forging a new pedagogy of writing. (HB)

In preparing students for their future discourse communities, the EAP/ESP literature has shown interest in the role of hedges in scientific literature. This interest has resulted in several studies that define and classify hedges, and hypothesize about their purpose. With these as our theoretical basis, we are led to ask "What is the relation to…

This paper presents an approach to analyzing classroom talk that sheds light on the intellectual work of the classroom. The analysis system extends the theoretical construct of preference organization from conversational analysis to the study of a whole-class, teaching-learning interaction in a ninth-grade English classroom, during which an expert…

Examines problems in the use of the term "community," including: (1) vague descriptions of community, without rules or boundaries; (2) its foreignness to students, raising questions about why students should learn it; and (3) its tendency to polarize writing theorists into community and individual camps. (JAD)

Assigned to teach a freshman composition course with a history and reading co-requisite, a New York college instructor developed a course in which students would begin to see history--through their reading, writing, and thinking--as a series of events intricately connected with their own lives and ways of looking at the world, rather than…

Designed to help teachers, grade six through high school, overcome misgivings about computers for writing and make the most of the new technology, this book offers answers to an urgent question in language arts: how can computers be woven into the human fabric of a writing workshop? The book is based on a five-year study of computers for writing…