The following publications focus primarily on the social or cultural dimensions of writing. You may also want to consult the related list of publications focussing on writing's cognitive dimension. Because of the interrelated nature of these topics, many publications are cross-listed.
TR 1. Research in Writing: Past, Present and Future, by
Sarah Warshauer Freedman, Anne Haas Dyson, Linda Flower,
and Wallace Chafe. This paper reviews the past twenty
years of writing research in order to posit a social-
cognitive theory of writing and the teaching and learning
of writing. The authors provide a constructive rationale
for the research mission of the Center for the Study of
Writing. (Note: For an updated version of this literature
review for a broader audience, see Occasional Paper No.
20.) August, 1987; 61 pages; $4.50.
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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.
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TR 5. Properties of Spoken and Written Language, by
Wallace Chafe and Jane Danielewicz. Chafe and Danielewicz
discuss important linguistic features that characterize
different types of spoken and written language, from
dinner conversations to academic papers. Taking into
account the cognitive and social demands made on speakers,
listeners, writers, and readers in their interactions,
they analyze the reasons for these language differences.
May, 1987; 27 pages; $4.00.
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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 28. The Cultural Imperatives Underlying Cognitive
Acts, by Kathleen McCormick (Reading-to-Write Report 9).
By setting reading-to-write in a broad cultural context,
this report explores some of the cultural imperatives that
might underlie particular cognitive acts. Protocols and
interviews suggest that three culturally-based attitudes
played a role in this task: the desire for closure, a
belief in objectivity, and a refusal to write about
perceived contradictions. May, 1989; 37 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 30. Expanding the Repertoire: An Anthology of
Practical Approaches for the Teaching of Writing,
edited by Kathleen McCormick (Reading-to-Write Report 11).
This set of classroom approaches, written by teachers
collaborating on a course that grew out of the Reading-to-
Write project, helps students to explore their assumptions
about their own reading and writing processes, become more
aware of the cognitive and cultural implications of their
choices, and find alternative approaches to the writing
task. May, 1989; 77 pages; $5.50.
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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 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.
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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.
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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 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.
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TR 56. Collaboration and the Construction of Meaning,
by Linda Flower and Lorraine Higgins. This study explores
the constructive and collaborative process of a group of
college freshmen in a writing course. Flower and Higgins
discuss the theoretical roots of collaborative planning,
look at students' planning as acts of construction and
negotiation, and raise questions about the role students'
strategic knowledge plays in this social/cognitive
process. December, 1991; 74 pages; $5.50.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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 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.
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OP 7. The Problem-Solving Processes of Writers and
Readers, by Ann S. Rosebery, Linda Flower, Beth Warren,
Betsy Bowen, Bertram C. Bruce, Margaret Kantz, and Ann M.
Penrose (from a joint project with the Center for the
Study of Reading). The authors focus on writing and
reading as forms of problem-solving that are shaped by
communicative purpose. They examine the kinds of problems
that arise as writers and readers attempt to communicate
with one another--as writers and readers try to write to a
specific audience, for example, or as readers try to
interpret an author's meaning--and the strategies they
draw upon to resolve those problems. January, 1989; 30
pages; $4.00.
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OP 8. Writing and Reading in the Community, by Robert
Gundlach, Marcia Farr, and Jenny Cook-Gumperz (from a
joint project with the Center for the Study of Reading).
This paper reviews recent scholarship on writing and
reading outside of school--that is, in the community, both
at home and in the workplace. Gundlach, Farr, and Cook-
Gumperz explore writing and reading as social practices
and consider the implications of this social view of
literacy outside of school for writing and reading
instruction in school. March, 1989; 41 pages; $4.00.
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OP 11. Cognition, Context, and Theory-Building, by Linda
Flower. In this paper, Flower addresses the debate in
composition studies over whether individual cognition or
social and cultural context provides the motive force for
the writing process. Flower posits the need for a more
integrated theoretical vision to explain the interaction
between context and cognition. She discusses ways
educators might build an interactive vision and how such a
vision might improve writing instruction. May, 1989; 27
pages; $4.00.
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OP 17. Toward a Dialectical Theory of Composing, by
Stuart Greene. Greene reviews recent social theories of
knowledge in composition studies and criticizes the
neglect of individual cognition--of how individuals
reflect, form judgments, make choices, and construct
meaning. He calls for a dialectical cognitive-social
epistemic that acknowledges both social and ideological
forces as well as cognitive processes in explaining how
students learn to write in their chosen disciplines.
January, 1990; 19 pages; $3.50.
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OP 22. "This Wooden Shack Place": The Logic of an
Unconventional Reading, by Glynda Hull and Mike Rose.
Hull and Rose analyze an interaction between Rose and a
student in a remedial college composition class, where the
student's personal history and cultural background shape
an unconventional reading of a poem used in a writing
assignment. They discuss the logic of the student's
interpretation of the poem, showing the value of
conversing with students about interpretations that
initially strike the teacher as "a little off the mark."
December, 1990; 10 pages; $3.50.
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OP 23. Changing Views of Language in Education and the
Implications for Literacy Research: An Interactional
Sociological Perspective, by Jenny Cook-Gumperz and
John J. Gumperz. This paper discusses the ways in which
language has entered into studies in education over the
past three decades. The authors suggest that an
interactional sociolinguistic perspective, where language
in the classroom is seen not just as an abstract
grammatical and semantic system but as a process of verbal
communication that includes culture-bound and contextual
knowledge, has a special usefulness for literacy research.
December, 1990; 22 pages; $4.00.
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