Landmark Essays On Esl Writing

In recent years, the number of nonnative speakers of English in colleges and universities in North America has increased dramatically. As a result, more and more writing teachers have found themselves working with these English as a Second Language (ESL) students in writing classes that are designed primarily with monolingual, native-English-speaking students in mind. Since the majority of institutions require these students to enroll in writing courses at all levels, it is becoming increasingly important for all writing teachers to be aware of the presence and special linguistic and cultural needs of ESL writers. This increase in the ESL population has, over the last 40 years, been paralleled by a similar growth in research on ESL writing and writing instruction--research that writing teachers need to be familiar with in order to work effectively with ESL writers in writing classrooms of all levels and types. Until recently, however, this body of knowledge has not been very accessible to writing teachers and researchers who do not specialize in second language research and instruction. This volume is an attempt to remedy this problem by providing a sense of how ESL writing scholarship has evolved over the last four decades. It brings together 15 articles that address various issues in second language writing in general and ESL writing in particular. In selecting articles for inclusion, the editors tried to take a principled approach. The articles included in this volume have been chosen from a large database of publications in second language writing. The editors looked for works that mirrored the state of the art when they were published and made a conscious effort to represent a wide variety of perspectives, contributions, and issues in the field. To provide a sense of the evolution of the field, this collection is arranged in chronological order.

This collection introduces the reader to the ideas that have shaped writing center theory and practice. The essays have been selected not only for the insight they offer into issues but also for their contributions to writing center scholarship. These papers help to chart the legitimation of writing centers by providing both a history and an examination of the philosophies, praxis, and politics that have defined this emerging field. They demonstrate the ways a clearer profile of the discipline has emerged from the research and reflection of writers, like those represented here. This volume charts the emergence of writing centers and the growing recognition of their contributions, roles, and importance. As a nascent discipline, writing centers reflect the concerns with marginality and with finding a respected place in the academy that characterize any new field of academic inquiry, practice, and research. Concomitantly, professionals in these fields seek standing within the academy and a way of defining and validating their contributions to the educational process. Contemporary writing center theorists look to interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary investigations to interpret the work they do and to clarify their aims to the academy at large. Their work employs a variety of philosophical perspectives -- ranging from sociolinguistics to psychoanalytic theory -- to show the complex nature and potential of writing center interactions. The idea has now become the multidimensional realities of the writing center within the academy and within society as a whole. What its role will be in future redefinitions of the educational process, how that role will be negotiated and evaluated, and how professionals will shape educational values will constitute the future landmark directions and essays on writing center theory and practice.

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Rhetoric, as a general teaching -- while preaching locality of action and guidelines for handling that locality -- has tended from the beginning to serve as a universality. It has offered a generalized techne with only limited categories, appropriate for all discursive situations, at least for those that were not excluded from the realm of rhetoric. Nonetheless, from its beginnings, rhetoric limited its interests to certain activity fields such as law, government, religion, and most important, the educators of leaders in these activity fields. This collection presents landmarks showing where the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) movements have gone. They have opened up a number of prospects that were impossible to see when rhetoric and composition confined their gaze to relatively few discursive activities. This suggests that the rhetorical landscape is becoming more complex and interesting, as well as more responsive to life in the complex, differentiated societies that have emerged in the last few centuries. This volume will reveal to scholars and researchers a range of possibilities for the study of disciplinary discourse and its teaching, and suggest to them new prospects for the future -- and for the better.

'... A well-organized volume with a strong emphasis on pedagogy.' – Trudy Smoke, Hunter College/City University of New York, USA 'Generation 1.5 is the most interesting topic of concern in ESL today, yet publications are few and far between.... The editors clearly know what they’re doing.... They know the field, know the subject matter, and understand the problems.... This volume contributes to the thinking in the field.' – Linda Lonon Blanton, University of New Orleans, USA Building on the work that has been done over the past decade, this volume provides theoretical frameworks for understanding debates about immigrant students, studies of students’ schooling paths and language and literacy experiences, and pedagogical approaches for working with Generation 1.5 students. Generation 1.5 in College Composition: is designed to help both scholars and practitioners reconceptualize the fields of College Composition and TESOL and create a space for research, theory, and pedagogy focusing on postsecondary immigrant ESL students provides both important new theoretical work (which lays the underpinnings for serious pedagogical innovation) and important new pedagogical approaches. Because of their varied and complex language and literacy profiles, Generation 1.5 students are found in developmental English courses, college ESL courses, and mainstream college writing courses. This volume is directed to preservice and inservice teachers, teacher educators, and researchers involved with educating Generation 1.5 students in these and other contexts.

On Second Language Writing brings together internationally recognized scholars in a collection of original articles that, collectively, delineate and explore central issues with regard to theory, research, instruction, assessment, politics, articulation with other disciplines, and standards. In recent years, there has been a dramatic growth of interest in second-language writing and writing instruction in many parts of the world. Although an increasing number of researchers and teachers in both second-language studies and composition studies have come to identify themselves as specialists in second-language writing, research and teaching practices have been dispersed into several different disciplinary and institutional contexts because of the interdisciplinary nature of the field. This volume is the first to bring together prominent second-language writing specialists to systematically address basic issues in the field and to consider the state of the art at the end of the century (and the millennium).

A textbook for composition pedagogy courses. It focuses on scholarship in rhetoric and composition that has influenced classroom teaching, in order to foster reflection on how theory impacts practice.