This article argues that graduate programs at large research universities do not prepare new WPAs for the realities of administrative work in small colleges. It first presents and then challenges a series of assumptions about the nature of WPA work, the resources available to facilitate that work, and the rhetorical strategies that are most useful…

The 2003 annual meeting of Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) opened in New York concurrently with the US invasion of Iraq on March 18, and many conference participants discussed the relation between rhetoric, the teaching of writing, and the war. This article presents some of the more memorable reflections on rhetoric and…

The arrival of large numbers of "non-traditional" students in higher education has led to rethinking the idea of the university itself and of the role of writing within it. This paper contributes to that debate by considering student writing within a broader framework than that of simply study skills or academic socialization, as in dominant…

How can students be encouraged to use writing to learn, as well as to think more critically, communicate better and build cooperative relationships with fellow students, under conditions of university expansion and underfunding? This article describes an action-learning project carried out at the University of Sussex investigating the use of peer…

This article challenges the assumption that the canon of memory means memorization and transcription, and, as a result, has little relevance for the writing classroom. An examination of the canon's historical legacy and its relationships to literacy and invention open a space for redefining the canon of memory as "rememoried knowing." In brief,…

In the fall of 2001 I taught a beginning college composition course at Minot State University, a small state university located in the northwestern quadrant of North Dakota. It is typical of such courses to include a fair amount of reading, and one of the texts I assigned was Ian Frazier's "Great Plains". The book is a travelogue that…

Susan Friedman, a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Florida, has found through her own teaching experience that incorporating autobiographical texts and self-writing into her pedagogical practices can foster a classroom environment that pays attention to subjectivity to promote mindful, ethical behavior in both…

The environment is a ready-made subject in writing classrooms, and teachers at all levels are encouraging students to write about nature and environmental issues. Environmental issues provide a equitable meeting place for students from a variety of different backgrounds, interests, and ideologies. There are also many pedagogical advantages to…

While the noticing function of output has been increasingly researched by a number of applied linguists, the nature of such noticing and its effect on subsequent learning in the context of EFL writing have not been fully investigated. In a four-stage writing task consisting of output, comparison, and two revisions, this study examined what…

Increased attention on written response to literature has tended to eliminate other forms of student writing in literature classrooms. However, when we allow students to write fiction unrelated to a particular text, their commitment to and understanding of texts are enhanced. This can serve as a means of engaging students with reading. Eight…

Responding with strategic empathy to the traumatic stories students share with us provides an opportunity to break down an elitist binary between teacher and student. Joyce Carol Oates's novel "them" can serve as a cautionary tale for understanding the dangers of disregarding student trauma. (Contains 2 notes.)

Researchers from Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC) surveyed faculty members from 10 academic research libraries to learn about scholarly publishing activities, attitudes, and policies. Areas of special interest included the effect of publishers' intellectual property policies and institutional promotion and tenure processes on library…

This study was undertaken to determine how students in a written business communication course differ from one another in terms of their motivational orientation and in the learning strategies they use. The Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) was administered to 44 students in two sections of a written business communication…

Introduction: While "teaching self-efficacy" has been supported as an important construct related to teacher competence (eg. Goddard, Hoy & Hoy, 2000), little is known about how in-service teachers think about themselves as writers, or writing self-efficacy, particularly as it relates to writing performance. The present study is a preliminary…

What syntactic patterns emerge in students' use of articles and modals? What are the reasons for these patterns? What implications do the findings of the study have for English language instruction in Botswana? Exactly 1556 essays comprising class assignments, written seminar presentations, test papers and examination scripts from 514 randomly…