In North American university contexts, the language diversity found in English mainstream composition ("L1") classrooms resembles more and more that found in ESL ("L2") writing classrooms. As these two groups become less differentiated, those specifically trained in L2 writing might well wonder whether the needs of the…

Over the last two decades the proportion of adolescents in the United States who are obese has nearly tripled, and schools, citing financial pressures, have given students greater access to "junk" foods, using the proceeds to fund school programs. We examine whether schools under financial pressure tend to adopt potentially unhealthful…

Business professionals and instructors often view writing skills as one of the most important qualifications that employees should possess. However, many business employees, including recent college graduates, have serious writing deficiencies, especially in their ability to use standard English. As a result, American businesses spend billions of…

While "internationalization" has become a buzzword in composition scholarship and teaching, our discourses tend toward fuzzy uses and understandings of the term and its multiple implications. We tend to focus on how our U.S. experience is being internationalized: how English and its teaching are spreading; how other countries, different…

Recent work has taken different approaches in attempting to use linguistics to identify the authors of documents by the style of their writing. Traditionally, linguists have sought to identify similarities and differences in a host of features, including spelling, syntax, word usage and others, and to draw inferences regarding authorship based on…

Increasing calls for equity and accountability in U.S. secondary schools have led to intensified scrutiny of the academic literacy development of English learning (EL) adolescents. This paper discusses some of the challenges that EL secondary students face in achieving the language and literacy skills that will enable them to succeed in their…

It is likely difficult for academics to think of a college or university that does not have some program of general education (GE). Over the past century, GE's model of liberal learning has become so entrenched in U.S. universities that it is widely seen as the core of the national undergraduate curriculum. In a series of distributed courses that…

The purpose of this collaborative schools-university study was to investigate how the explicit instruction of literary devices during designated literacy sessions could improve the quality of children's narrative writing. A guiding question for the study was: Can children's writing can be enhanced by teachers drawing attention to the literary…

A long-time detractor of immersion education has been the concern that a substantial proportion of teaching in and about a language other than English might potentially lead to irreparable damage to immersion students' development in English and, hence, their ability to function in an English-dominant society. The assessment in this article,…

Compares the development of copyright in the United Kingdom and the United States in relation to writing, literary works and other forms of intellectual property, and computer programs to show how writing is a unifying principle for documents and computers. (68 references) (EAM)

Schools seem to serve certain groups of people over others. Schools become "sorting mechanisms in which select groups of students are favored on the basis of race, class, and gender." Students within the dominant culture gain cultural capital, while students outside the dominant culture are often left without the means to gain entry into…

This document is a report on a study of errors in spelling which high school students in 48 states, the District of Columbia, and Canada have made in their writing, with special reference to the words most frequently misspelled, their relative frequency, and the kinds of spelling errors which the student made. An analysis of the different words…

Letters over a period of 25 years from a Canadian who came to the United States after college graduation to teach in various parts of the country, then returned to teach in Canada, reflect substantial differences between the 2 educational systems in regard to the teaching and testing of writing. (MSE)

The compelling challenge to the notion that increased access to higher education in the United States has improved, is overviewed. However, according to Sharon O'Dair, graduate students choose an arcane literary specialty over composition, as it is not regarded as challenging and rewarding.