The two current approaches to teaching academic discourse are conventional and collaborative; in practice, they overlap because both are based on a "conversational model" of learning to write in college. Taxonomists and collaborationists disagree on the relative emphasis that should be placed on the various pedagogical methods: collaborationists fear that taxonomists adhere too rigidly to conventions and taxonomists fear that collaborationists ignore the problem of how much--or little--students know about these conventions in the first place. The conversational model emphasizes the social context for writing which helps teachers to diagnose student writing problems as systemic conditions, involving the whole academic community, and not as local deficiencies in the students themselves. Students can be motivated to participate in academic discourse by pointing out that if they do not, they lose access to academic knowledge, and hence limit their future social, economic, and political options. Both taxonomists and collaborationists take the conversational model too literally; in order for a conversation-as-dialogue to foster initiation into a particular conversation-as-discourse, the participants in the dialogue must have some knowledge of the discursive practices of the larger conversation. In recognition of this inherent conflict, an in-depth, comparative, ethnological study of discursive practices in and out of school needs to be performed. (SRT)