Choose an instructional level:
TR 2. Unintentional Helping in the Primary Grades:
Writing in the Children's World, by Anne Haas Dyson.
Dyson explores children's classroom social lives, as
revealed during journal time in a first/second grade
class. Her analysis of peer social interactions shows such
interactions to be key in contributing to and nurturing
the skills and values associated with literacy. May, 1987;
29 pages; $4.00.
TR 8. Writing and Reading in the Classroom, by James
Britton (a joint report with the Center for the Study of
Reading). Britton explores the classroom as an environment
for literacy and literacy learning. He discusses ways in
which teachers have developed strategies for encouraging
children to learn to write-and-read--activities that have
often been dissociated in classrooms but that together
create a literacy learning environment. August, 1987; 25
pages; $4.00.
TR 9. Individual Differences in Beginning Composing: An
Orchestral Vision of Learning to Write, by Anne Haas
Dyson. Looking in depth at three first graders during
classroom journal time, Dyson explores the
interconnections of the children's speaking, writing, and
drawing as indications of their developing acquisition of
written language. Her analysis reveals the complexity of
the writing acquisition process, as the three symbol
systems interact in different ways for the different
students. August, 1987; 28 pages; $4.00.
TR 10. Movement Into Word Reading and Spelling: How
Spelling Contributes to Reading, by Linnea C. Ehri (a
joint report with the Center for the Study of Reading).
Drawing on studies of the role of spelling in the reading
process, Ehri discusses ways in which spelling contributes
to the development of reading and, conversely, how reading
contributes to spelling development. The role of writing
in reading and spelling development is also discussed.
September, 1987; 15 pages; $3.50.
TR 14. National Surveys of Successful Teachers of
Writing and Their Students: The United Kingdom and
the United States, by Sarah Warshauer Freedman and Alex
McLeod. For this study, Freedman and McLeod collected
self-report survey data from successful elementary and
secondary teachers of writing and from a sample of
secondary students in the U.K. to parallel Freedman's 1987
U.S. survey data. Based on these surveys, this report
compares the teaching and learning of writing in the two
countries, focusing on what occurs inside classrooms as
writing gets taught and learned. May, 1988; 49 pages;
$4.00.
TR 15. Negotiating Among Multiple Worlds: The
Space/Time Dimensions of Young Children's Composing,
by Anne Haas Dyson. In this examination of the drawing,
talking, and writing of kindergartners, first-, and
second-graders, Dyson focuses on children's growing
awareness of text time and space as they develop as
authors of fictional prose. This study questions the
developmental appropriateness of traditional assumptions
about "embedded" and "disembedded" language and about
"narrative" and "expository" prose. May, 1988; 36 pages;
$4.00.
TR 20. Forms of Writing and Rereading From Writing: A
Preliminary Report, by Elizabeth Sulzby, June Barnhart,
and Joyce Hieshima (a joint report with the Center for the
Study of Reading). The authors report on a study of young
children's use of five emergent forms of writing--
scribble, drawing, non-phonetic letter strings, phonetic
or invented spelling, and conventional orthography.
Describing developmental patterns of writing and rereading
from writing found among kindergarten children, the
authors discuss ways that children build a repertoire of
useful linguistic tools using these five forms. July,
1989; 34 pages; $4.00.
TR 36. "Once-upon-a-Time" Reconsidered: The
Developmental Dialectic Between Function and Form,
by Anne Haas Dyson. Based on a three-year study of writing
development in an urban magnet school, this essay traces
the evolution of "once-upon-a-time" in a case-study
child's classroom story writing. Dyson demonstrates how
the story forms young children learn from others are not
the end products, but the catalysts, of development. July,
1989; 30 pages; $4.00.
TR 42. The Word and the World: Reconceptualizing
Written Language Development, or, Do Rainbows Mean a
Lot to Little Girls? by Anne Haas Dyson. Arguing that
current research has fragmented educators' vision of both
written language and literacy development, Dyson offers a
more integrated vision that preserves the integrity of
written language as a symbol system, suggests five
principles characterizing written language development
that highlight the dialectical relationship between child
construction and adult guidance, and discusses
implications for early literacy instruction. April, 1990;
29 pages; $4.00.
TR 45. Effects of Controlled, Primerese Language on the
Reading Process, by Paul Ammon, Herbert D. Simons, and
Charles Elster. Millions of American children have
received beginning reading instruction based on
"controlled" texts in which words from a restricted
vocabulary are used repeatedly in short sentences. To
determine whether such "primerese" language makes learning
to read easier or more difficult, the authors rewrote four
primerese stories from basal readers to use more "natural"
language. They then compared the effects of the original
versus the rewritten texts on the reading process and
reading comprehension of first graders. December, 1990; 22
pages; $4.00.
TR 49. Visions of Children as Language Users: Research
on Language and Language Education in Early
Childhood, by Anne Haas Dyson and Celia Genishi. In this
report, Dyson and Genishi review recent research on oral
and written language development in early childhood. They
discuss how a vision of young children as active
participants in a community has been reflected in and has
helped shape research themes and current issues in
language arts education. June, 1991; 30 pages; $4.00.
TR 53. The Case of the Singing Scientist: A Performance
Perspective on the "Stages" of School Literacy, by
Anne Haas Dyson. This article offers a case study of a
young African-American child in an urban K/1 classroom who
used writing activities to perform, rather than simply to
communicate. The child's assumptions about written
language and texts conflicted in revealing ways with
assumptions undergirding a "writing workshop" approach.
The study examines the links between oral performance,
literacy pedagogy, and the use of the explicit, analytic
language valued in school. September, 1991; 34 pages;
$4.00.
TR 60. Collaboration Between Children Learning to
Write: Can Novices be Masters? by Colette Daiute and
Bridget Dalton. Daiute and Dalton explore the role of peer
collaboration in literacy development as a case study in
the broader inquiry on the social nature of learning and
cognitive development. They analyze individual and
collaborative stories produced by low-achieving urban
third-graders on a computer, as well as transcripts of the
talk between collaborative pairs, to illustrate that
children can learn and use complex story elements by
working with their peers. April, 1992; 54 pages; $4.50.
TR 63. "Whistle for Willie," Lost Puppies, and Cartoon
Dogs: The Sociocultural Dimensions of Young
Children's Composing, or, Toward Unmelting
Pedagogical Pots, by Anne Haas Dyson. Drawing on data
from an urban elementary school, Dyson suggests ways that
the "process" approach to teaching writing, in spite of
many positive features, may be too rigidly implemented to
allow for the needs of young writers in multicultural
classrooms. She argues that teachers need to be sensitive
to social and cultural diversity and respond with a
greater variety of textual models and writing activities
in their classrooms. June, 1992; 30 pages; $4.00.
TR 65. Student Portfolios and Teacher Logs: Blueprint
for a Revolution in Assessment, by Robert C. Calfee
and Pam Perfumo. This report reviews the concept of
alternative assessment in a specific situation: teacher
assessment of student achievement in the language arts in
the elementary grades. Calfee and Perfumo first present
preliminary findings from a survey of portfolio practice
in selected elementary programs throughout the United
States. They then present a new concept, the Teacher
Logbook, designed to support and effectuate the portfolio
approach, and to connect portfolios to other facets of
teacher professionalization. April, 1993; 12 pages; $3.50.
TR 67. From Invention to Social Action in Early
Childhood Literacy: A Reconceptualization through
Dialogue about Difference, by Anne Haas Dyson. Drawing
on a recent ethnographic study of child composing in an
urban primary school, Dyson contrasts dominant assumptions
about appropriate developmental practices (i.e., invented
spelling, process writing) with children's interpretations
of those practices, interpretations grounded in children's
social and cultural worlds. She argues that infusing
situatedness and culture into the ways in which educators
observe and make sense of children's written language
should make "normal" a range of possible pathways to
literacy--and "appropriate" a range of ways of teaching.
September, 1993; 17 pages; $3.50.
TR 70. The Ninjas, the X-Men, and the Ladies: Playing
with Power and Identity in an Urban Primary School,
by Anne Haas Dyson. Based on a qualitative study of
writing in an urban second grade classroom, Dyson analyzes
children's symbolic and social use of superhero stories--
popular media stories that vividly reveal societal beliefs
about power and gender, which are themselves interwoven in
complex ways with race, class, and physical demeanor.
Through the writing and acting of their stories, the
children raised issues about who plays whom in whose
story. The dialogic processes thus enacted allowed rigid
images of gender relations and of glorified power to be
rendered more complex. August, 1994; 20 pages; $3.50.
TR 71. Writing Children: Reinventing the Development of
Childhood Literacy, by Anne Haas Dyson. Adult ways of
writing about children have traditionally taken for
granted the social and ideological worlds of privileged
adults. In this essay, Dyson aims to make problematic such
writing by reviewing new visions of language and of
development that acknowledge human sociocultural and
ideological complexity. To more fully explore these new
visions, this essay also offers a concrete illustration of
writing children as social and ideologically complex
beings. It concludes by considering implications for both
professional writing and classroom pedagogy. April 1995;
38 pages; $4.00.
TR 73. Children Out of Bounds: The Power of Case Studies
in Expanding Visions of Literacy Development, by Anne Haas
Dyson. In this paper, Dyson argues for the value of case
studies in contributing to a developing understanding of
how children learn to write. Drawing on fifteen years of
case study research, Dyson reviews the cases of three of
her focal students, Rachel, Jake, and Tina, and uses them
to illustrate the varied ways each case pushes the boundaries
of theoretical understandings. She concludes that case
studies provide contextual complexities and a depth of
detail unavailable through other research methodologies,
but cautions against prescribing simplistic teaching
"methods" based solely upon case study findings. June 1995;
34 pages; $4.00.
OP 3. Drawing, Talking and Writing: Rethinking Writing
Development, by Anne Haas Dyson. Based on Dyson's studies
of primary grade children engaged in journal writing, this
paper discusses how children move among and negotiate
multiple worlds: the text world they create on paper; the
social world that they share with their peers; and the
wider experienced world of people, places, events and
things. Children's texts thus become increasingly embedded
in their lives. February, 1988; 26 pages; $4.00.
OP 13. Must Teachers Also Be Writers? by Vivian Gussin
Paley. In this paper, Paley provides examples of her
classroom experiences with kindergartners, showing how
keeping a daily journal helps her to understand her
students, their learning, and her own teaching. Says
Paley: "Only as we write down our thoughts and
observations may we question and argue with ourselves
about the things we do and say." September, 1989; 17
pages; $3.50.
OP 16. Using Student Writing to Assess and Promote
Understandings in Science, by Paul Ammon and Mary Sue
Ammon. Using examples of writing from elementary and high
school students, this paper suggests that writing
assignments can be a particularly rich source of
information for science teachers who wish to take their
students' present understandings into account as they plan
and carry out instruction. January, 1990; 6 pages; $3.50.
OP 19. Weaving Possibilities: Rethinking Metaphors for
Early Literacy Development, by Anne Haas Dyson. Dyson
offers critical reflections on current ways of thinking
about literacy teaching and learning, arguing that we must
attend not only to the vertical "scaffolding" of young
children's efforts but also to the horizontal "weaving" of
their diverse intentions and resources. To clarify both
the limits of scaffolding and the complementary
possibilities of weaving, Dyson offers a closer look at
the classroom experiences of two case-study
kindergartners. July, 1990; 19 pages; $3.50.
OP 28. A Social Perspective on Informal Assessment:
Voices, Texts, Pictures, and Play from a First
Grade, by Sarah Merritt and Anne Haas Dyson. This paper
focuses on a first grade classroom in a multi-ethnic urban
school and discusses the ways in which Merritt, as the
classroom teacher, informally assesses the progress of her
students. Merritt and Dyson show how a teacher, like an
archaeologist gathering artifacts, can use the materials
produced in a classroom's social community to search for
clues that make clear how and what children are learning
and how teachers might best support that learning.
September, 1991; 24 pages; $4.00.
OP 32. From Prop to Mediator: The Changing Role of
Written Language in Children's Symbolic Repertoires,
by Anne Haas Dyson. Using illustrations from an ongoing
study of literacy development among African-American
children in an urban school, Dyson examines how children's
use of written language changes during the early childhood
years. She argues that there is no linear progression in
written language development; rather, written language
emerges most strongly when it is embedded within a child's
total symbolic repertoires, including drawing, playing,
singing, dancing, and storytelling. Further, she cautions
against the uncritical use of writing process pedagogy
with young children. September, 1992; 22 pages; $4.00.
OP 35. Confronting the Split between "The Child" and
Children: Toward New Curricular Visions of the Child
Writer, by Anne Haas Dyson. Dyson uses everyday school
experiences with children to reconstruct our image of "the
child." She considers dominant ways in which educators
have constructed the concept of "the child writer," and
illustrates one way of reconceiving that child. In the
process, she suggests that rethinking dominant images
might help teachers better meet current curricular
challenges, especially the need to envision the child in
ways that reflect belief in the diversity of children with
whom teachers work. May, 1994; 20 pages; $3.50.
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TR 3. A Good Girl Writes Like a Good Girl: Written
Response and Clues to the Teaching/Learning Process,
by Melanie Sperling and Sarah Warshauer Freedman. Sperling
and Freedman present a case study of a high-achieving
student in a ninth-grade English class, exploring and
analyzing sources of the student's misunderstanding of
teacher-written response to her writing. They uncover a
complexity of strategies that lie behind the
misunderstanding, reflecting the information, skills, and
values that teacher and student bring to the writing
process. May, 1987; 18 pages; $3.50.
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TR 12. Peer Response Groups in Two Ninth-Grade
Classrooms, by Sarah Warshauer Freedman. Freedman looks
at peer response groups in two ninth-grade college
preparatory classrooms. Her analysis of the students'
face-to-face interactions reveals how students approach
the substance and form of their writing, self- and other-
evaluation, problem-solving, and audience awareness.
October, 1987; 29 pages; $4.00.
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TR 14. National Surveys of Successful Teachers of
Writing and Their Students: The United Kingdom and
the United States, by Sarah Warshauer Freedman and Alex
McLeod. For this study, Freedman and McLeod collected
self-report survey data from successful elementary and
secondary teachers of writing and from a sample of
secondary students in the U.K. to parallel Freedman's 1987
U.S. survey data. Based on these surveys, this report
compares the teaching and learning of writing in the two
countries, focusing on what occurs inside classrooms as
writing gets taught and learned. May, 1988; 49 pages;
$4.00.
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TR 18. Readers as Writers Composing from Sources, by
Nancy Nelson Spivey and James R. King. Extending research
on writing processes as well as reading processes, this
study examines the report-writing of sixth, eighth, and
tenth graders, as accomplished and less accomplished
readers work with source texts and compose their own new
texts. Analyses reveal composing patterns connected not
only to grade level but to reading ability as well.
February, 1989; 30 pages; $4.00.
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TR 22. Promises of Coherence, Weak Content, and Strong
Organization: An Analysis of the Student Texts, by
Margaret Kantz (Reading-to-Write Report 3). This report
describes the ways that readers saw the structures in a
set of freshman essays and discusses the problems the
judges had in agreeing on how some students had
interpreted the writing assignment. Analysis of students'
organizing plans suggests that both students and teachers
may sometimes confuse coherence strategies (for text) with
knowledge transformation strategies (for content). May,
1989; 35 pages; $4.00.
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TR 37. I Want to Talk to Each of You: Collaboration and
the Teacher-Student Writing Conference, by Melanie
Sperling. Following ethnographic procedures, Sperling
examines teacher-student writing conferences in a ninth-
grade English class for six case-study students. Through
discourse analysis and descriptive narrative, Sperling
shows how collaboration between teacher and student
encourages students' learning as writers. October, 1989;
56 pages; $4.50.
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TR 48. Dialogues of Deliberation: Conversation in the
Teacher-Student Writing Conference, by Melanie
Sperling. Sperling focuses on three students in a ninth-
grade English class--including a very quiet student and a
very talkative one--as they converse with their teacher
about their ongoing writing. Suggesting a broadened model
of effective writing conference instruction, Sperling
examines how such one-to-one conversations contribute to
the processes of writing and learning to write for various
students. May, 1991; 25 pages; $4.00.
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TR 57. Technological Indeterminacy: The Role of
Classroom Writing Practices in Shaping Computer Use,
by Cynthia Greenleaf. This study examines the integration
of computers into a remedial high school English class.
Greenleaf focuses on writing practices before and after
computers were introduced, and concludes that the
teacher's structuring of writing instruction had the
greatest impact on student writing and the ways computers
entered into writing. She argues that computers do not
function as independent variables in classrooms, but
rather as part of a complex network of social and
pedagogical interactions. Winner of NCTE's Promising
Researcher Award. January, 1992; 40 pages; $4.00.
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TR 58. Composition in the Context of CAP: A Case Study
of the Interplay Between Assessment and School Life,
by Peggy Trump Loofbourrow. This study examines the impact
of a large-scale writing assessment, the California
Assessment Program (CAP), on the life of one junior high
school, analyzing how teachers and administrators at the
school prepared students for the eighth-grade assessment.
Loofbourrow finds that teachers' interpretations of the
assessment, influenced by their own education, experience,
and teaching philosophy, result in significant differences
in writing instruction in individual classrooms. Winner of
NCTE's Promising Researcher Award. January, 1992; 30 pages;
$4.00.
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TR 66. Linking Classroom Discourse and Classroom
Content: Following the Trail of Intellectual Work in
a Writing Lesson, by Cynthia Greenleaf and Sarah
Warshauer Freedman. This paper presents an approach to
analyzing classroom talk that sheds light on the
intellectual work of the classroom. The authors analyze a
whole-class interaction in a ninth-grade English
classroom. The analysis reveals the underlying
intellectual structure of the interaction, including the
teacher's pedagogical goals, the cognitive skills required
for successful student participation in the activity, and
the strategies students apply to the task. September,
1993; 42 pages; $4.00.
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TR 68. Crossing the Bridge to Practice: Rethinking the
Theories of Vygotsky and Bakhtin, by Sarah Warshauer
Freedman. Freedman argues that Vygotsky's and Bakhtin's
theories of social interaction are so general that they
are not always useful guides for classroom practice. A
comparison of secondary school classrooms in Great Britain
and the United States reveals that when teachers apply
similar theories to everyday practice, important
pedagogical contrasts remain--both in terms of the ways
instruction is organized and in terms of what students
produce. May, 1994; 16 pages; $3.50.
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TR 72. Nerds, Normal People, and Homeboys: Asian American
Students and the Language of School Success, by Stanford T.
Goto. This study is an attempt to complicate current
explanations of Asian American success in school. Using
ethnographic methods, Goto examines how a group of high-
achieving Chinese American high school freshmen perceive
themselves as learners and group members, and how these
perceptions relate to existing research on Asian American
success. He argues that their behavior in school is directly
influenced by their perceptions of Asian and non-Asian
peers; their awareness of family expectations and status
mobility are related but less direct influences. Winner of
NCTE's Promising Researcher Award. June 1995; 30 pages;
$4.00.
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OP 9. Bridges: From Personal Writing to the Formal
Essay, by James Moffett. Moffett discusses the transition
from writing personal-experience themes to writing formal
essays. As a framework for understanding this transition,
he presents a schema that groups different writing types
and shows their connections. As illustration, he includes
examples of student writing from his anthology series
Active Voices. March, 1989; 19 pages; $3.50.
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OP 16. Using Student Writing to Assess and Promote
Understandings in Science, by Paul Ammon and Mary Sue
Ammon. Using examples of writing from elementary and high
school students, this paper suggests that writing
assignments can be a particularly rich source of
information for science teachers who wish to take their
students' present understandings into account as they plan
and carry out instruction. January, 1990; 6 pages; $3.50.
Order report
OP 26. High School English and the Teacher-Student
Writing Conference: Fine-Tuned Duets in the Ensemble
of the Classroom, by Melanie Sperling. Sperling provides
a glimpse into an urban ninth-grade English classroom and
examines some of the teacher-student conferences that take
place there. She shows that even if a secondary school
teacher lacks time for lengthy one-to-one interactions,
the teacher's brief conversations with individual students
can play an important role in writing instruction. May,
1991; 10 pages; $3.50.
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OP 30. Untracking Advanced Placement English: Creating
Opportunity is Not Enough, by Joan Kernan Cone. In this
paper, Cone describes what happened when she opened up her
Advanced Placement English class at an urban high school
to any students who were willing to commit to a rigorous
regimen of reading and writing. She discusses the changes
she made in her teaching strategies in order to make
success possible for all of her students, many of whom had
never been in an advanced English class before. April,
1992; 10 pages; $3.50.
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OP 36. Moving Writing Research into the 21st Century,
by Sarah Warshauer Freedman. Freedman argues that writing
research in the 21st century will benefit by being
inclusive--of a diverse population of learners, taught by
a diverse population of teachers, using approaches that
allow for a diversity of ways of learning--with new
knowledge gathered from diverse sources and with diverse
methods. Using her own research on learning to write in
inner-city schools in the U.S. and Great Britain, Freedman
shows how specific research on the learning of diverse
populations pushes educators to elaborate existing
theories. Finally, she explains the influence of such
theory-building on her continuing research on inner-city
secondary students in the U.S. May, 1994; 14 pages; $3.50.
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OP 37. What's Involved?: Setting up a Writing Exchange,
by Sarah Warshauer Freedman. This paper describes a
writing exchange pairing classes in the San Francisco Bay
Area, grades six through nine, with classes in inner-city
London. Through these writing exchanges pairs of teachers
on both sides of the Atlantic worked to get students
seriously involved in using written language, especially
students with long histories of school failure. Freedman
shows how writing substantial pieces for a distant but
real whole-class audience helped students to care about
their writing and make significant strides as writers.
June, 1994; 26 pages; $4.00.
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OP 40. Revealing the Teacher-as-Reader: A Framework for
Discussion and Learning, by Melanie Sperling. Based on
detailed observations of an eleventh-grade English
teacher's responses to her students' writing, Sperling
offers a framework for thinking about the perspective
teachers bring to reading students' writing. In her
framework, Sperling identifies five key ways that this
teacher reader oriented herself to her student writers and
their writing, and suggests that other teachers in other
settings can put the observations derived from this case
to the test of their own classroom experiences. March,
1995; 12 pages; $3.50.
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OP 41. ... And Justice for All, by Griselle M. Diaz-Gemmati.
In this essay, Diaz-Gemmati, an eighth grade English teacher
and a teacher researcher affiliated with the Center's M-CLASS
project, writes about the surprising friction and division
that occurred when her students began to explore themes of
racism and prejudice through literature and writing. Although
the students were from diverse racial heritages, they had
always gotten along well until the their diverse views of
racism became an explicit part of classroom life. Diaz-Gemmati
describes the process by which her students were able to work
through their differences and come to a new understanding of
one another. June 1995; 24 pages; $4.00.
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TR 6. The Role of Task Representation in Reading-to-
Write, by Linda Flower (Reading-to-Write Report 2). In a
study of college writers, Flower looks at the ways
different writers interpret a "standard" writing task. In
analyzing their reading and writing strategies, Flower
demonstrates how students construct significantly
different representations of a task, leading to
differences in their texts and their writing process.
June, 1987; 35 pages; $4.00.
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TR 16. How the Writing Context Shapes College Students'
Strategies for Writing from Sources, by Jennie Nelson
and John R. Hayes. This study explores processes college
students use to write assigned research papers. It
examines the skills and assumptions that freshmen and more
advanced college students bring to the tasks of selecting
paper topics, finding and selecting sources of
information, and developing an organizing structure and
thesis for their papers. August, 1988; 22 pages; $4.00.
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TR 17. Written Rhetorical Syntheses: Processes and
Products, by Margaret Kantz. Addressing the ways in which
college students synthesize source material when they
write research papers, Kantz presents case study analyses
of the composing processes and written products of three
undergraduates, supplemented by quantitative analyses of a
group of seventeen undergraduate research papers. From
this analysis, she offers a tentative model of a
synthesizing process. January, 1989; 26 pages; $4.00.
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TR 19. Rethinking Remediation: Toward a Social-
Cognitive Understanding of Problematic Reading and
Writing, by Glynda Hull and Mike Rose. This paper
presents a case study of the writing produced by a
community college student, considered "at risk" of not
succeeding in school, for a basic reading and writing
class. The authors reveal what writing strategies, habits,
rules, and assumptions characterize the writing skills of
this underprepared student and suggest a pedagogy to move
such students toward more conventional discourse. May,
1989; 16 pages; $3.50.
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TR 21. Studying Cognition in Context: Introduction to
the Study, by Linda Flower (Reading-to-Write Report 1).
Reading-to-write is an act of critical literacy central to
much of academic discourse. This report introduces the
Reading-to-Write project, which examined the cognitive
processes of reading-to-write as they were embedded in the
social context of a college course. Flower discusses the
background to the project and provides an overview of the
study design, which included an exploratory study
(Technical Report 6) and a teaching study (Technical
Reports 22-30). May, 1989; 42 pages; $4.00.
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TR 22. Promises of Coherence, Weak Content, and Strong
Organization: An Analysis of the Student Texts, by
Margaret Kantz (Reading-to-Write Report 3). This report
describes the ways that readers saw the structures in a
set of freshman essays and discusses the problems the
judges had in agreeing on how some students had
interpreted the writing assignment. Analysis of students'
organizing plans suggests that both students and teachers
may sometimes confuse coherence strategies (for text) with
knowledge transformation strategies (for content). May,
1989; 35 pages; $4.00.
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TR 27. Translating Context into Action, by John Ackerman
(Reading-to-Write Report 8). Based on protocols, texts,
and interviews, this report describes a set of "initial
reading strategies" nearly every freshman used to begin
the task--strategies that appear to reflect their training
in summarization and recitation of information. From this
limited and often unexamined starting point, students then
had to construct a solution path which either clung to,
modified, or rejected this a-rhetorical initial approach
to reading and writing. May, 1989; 31 pages; $4.00.
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TR 29. Negotiating Academic Discourse, by Linda Flower
(Reading-to-Write Report 10). Academic writing is both a
cognitive and social process guided by strategic
knowledge--the goals writers set based on their reading of
the context, the strategies they invoke, and their
awareness of both these processes. This report discusses
the difficulties experienced by many college freshmen as
they seek to negotiate the transition from a writing
process based on comprehension and response to a more
fully rhetorical, constructive process. May, 1989; 43
pages; $4.00.
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TR 33. Social Context and Socially Constructed Texts:
The Initiation of a Graduate Student into a Writing
Research Community, by Carol Berkenkotter, Thomas N.
Huckin, and John Ackerman. The authors explore academic
and professional writing as it is shaped by social
contexts. They examine a case-study doctoral student's
writing development as, over time, he learns how to
produce the type of academic prose valued by the
professional community in which he is becoming a member.
July, 1989; 22 pages; $4.00.
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TR 40. Reading, Writing, and Knowing: The Role of
Disciplinary Knowledge in Comprehension and
Composing, by John M. Ackerman. To explore how
experienced writers use both knowledge of a specific
discipline and knowledge of general rhetorical skills,
Ackerman analyses 40 synthesis essays written by graduate
students in psychology and business. He finds that reading
comprehension and composing processes are interrelated.
March, 1990; 42 pages; $4.00.
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TR 43. "This Was an Easy Assignment": Examining How
Students Interpret Academic Writing Tasks, by Jennie
Nelson. This study explores academic writing from the
students' side of the desk, examining how thirteen college
freshmen interpreted writing assignments in a variety of
courses and how these interpretations differed from the
intentions of the instructors making the assignments.
October, 1990; 28 pages; $4.00.
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TR 44. Remediation as Social Construct: Perspectives
from an Analysis of Classroom Discourse, by Glynda
Hull, Mike Rose, Kay Losey Fraser, and Marisa Castellano.
This paper examines remediation as a social construct, as
the product of assumptions, perceptions, and beliefs about
literacy and learning. The authors illustrate some ways in
which notions of learners as remedial, as deficient, can
be created and played out in the classroom. They look
closely at one college student and detail the
interactional processes by which she is being defined as
remedial. February, 1991; 30 pages; $4.00.
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TR 52. Planning Text Together: The Role of Critical
Reflection in Student Collaboration, by Lorraine
Higgins, Linda Flower, and Joseph Petraglia. The authors
argue that student collaboration does not necessarily
foster critical reflection in writing tasks; use of
reflection depends on students' assumptions about peer
interaction and the task itself. Three forms of reflection
were identified in college students' collaborative
planning on a course paper: evaluating, considering
alternatives, and justifying. While not all students
engaged in reflective thinking, those who did were more
likely to produce high-quality plans. September, 1991; 26
pages; $4.00.
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TR 55. Writing from Sources: Authority in Text and
Task, by Stuart Greene. In this study, fifteen
undergraduates in a European history seminar were asked to
write either a report or a problem-based essay,
integrating prior knowledge with information from six
textual sources. Analyses of the student essays as well as
think-aloud protocols and reading-writing logs revealed
that the groups differed significantly in their
interpretations of the two tasks and in their approaches
to restructuring textual information; students writing
problem-based essays included significantly more content
units in their essays than students writing reports.
October, 1991; 32 pages; $4.00.
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TR 59. Constructing a Research Paper: A Study of
Students' Goals and Approaches, by Jennie Nelson. This
study considers the processes involved in writing an
academic research paper. Nelson studied twenty-one college
freshmen enrolled in an introductory cognitive psychology
class to determine how students understood the teacher's
research paper assignments, whether students took
extensive notes and produced multiple drafts, and whether
these "high-investment" reading and writing processes led
to higher-quality papers. February, 1992; 16 pages; $3.50.
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TR 61. The Development of Writing Abilities in a
Foreign Language: Contributions Toward a General
Theory of L2 Writing, by Guadalupe Valdes, Paz Haro, and
Maria Paz Echevarriarza. This paper contributes to a
theory of foreign language writing by examining current
assumptions about the development of writing skills in a
foreign language embedded in the ACTFL Proficiency
Guidelines. The authors test these assumptions by
analyzing writing produced by university students studying
Spanish at three levels of proficiency. April, 1992; 30
pages; $4.00.
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TR 62. Nested Contexts: A Basic Writing Adjunct Program
and the Challenge of "Educational Equity," by Anne
DiPardo. This study examines one university's efforts to
promote the academic success of underrepresented minority
students through a basic writing adjunct program. DiPardo
considers interactions between selected small-group
leaders and their students in light of the wider
departmental and campus-wide contexts and the tensions and
controversies surrounding the university's efforts to
promote "educational equity." May, 1992; 50 pages; $4.50.
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OP 6. Narrative Knowers, Expository Knowledge:
Discourse as Dialectic, by Anne DiPardo. DiPardo
explores the schism between narrative and exposition and
argues that instruction which fosters a "grand leap" away
from narrative into the presumably more grown-up world of
expository prose denies students the development of a
complex way of knowing and seeing, robbing them of
critical developmental experience with language. January,
1989; 34 pages; $4.00.
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OP 14. Shirley and the Battle of Agincourt: Why It Is
So Hard for Students to Write Persuasive Researched
Analyses, by Margaret Kantz. Using a fictional college
sophomore called Shirley and her essay on the Battle of
Agincourt, Kantz connects recent research on expository
writing with a discussion of common student problems in
writing a term paper. Kantz describes rhetorical
strategies students can learn that will make their essays
more interesting. November, 1989; 25 pages; $4.00.
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OP 21. Redefining Revision for Freshmen, by David L.
Wallace and John R. Hayes. This study investigates the
impact of explicit instructions on the revising strategies
of college freshmen. Wallace and Hayes find that students
instructed to revise globally produce better revisions
than students simply asked to revise. They were able to
produce a significant increase in global revision and in
revision quality with just eight minutes of instruction,
which allowed students to access revision skills they
already possessed. July, 1990; 10 pages; $3.50.
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