The key ideas developed by the Writing across the Curriculum Project begun at the University of London in 1965 center on the ways in which discourse is acquired by children in a psycholinguistic sense. Among those ideas are (1) knowledge is socially determined through the interweaving of individual consciousnesses, each of which is busy construing its reality through and in contact with others; (2) a child's language and cognitive functions develop in parallel; (3) development in expressive language must come before development in participant and spectator language; (4) an individual's language use develops from the undifferentiated expressive mode along a continuum toward either participant or spectator language and through several stages of development within each; (5) the viewpoint of the writer is the significant controlling function in the relationship between the reader and the writer; and (6) there is a differentiation between the different roles of the teacher, both toward the individual student and toward the whole class. (HOD)