Teaching Writing

Abstract

With just the two words of the title “Teaching writing,” we are thrown into ambiguity characteristic of the enterprise the title names. Is that second word a participle, referring to the activity of generating, composing, and revising ideas on paper, or is it a more static gerund noun form—writing as an artifact, as text presented on a page, performing social functions? The position we take with regard to the multiple realities encompassed in this dichotomy and in others in our field gives shape to our teaching. And that shape is changing.

Exploring Variability in Judging Writing Ability in a Second Language: A Study of Four Experienced Raters of Esl Compositions

“…The cultural divisions established by Kaplan (e.g., "Oriental," "Romance") appear, in retrospect, to be too broad, and the approach is also dangerously open to stereotyping (Raimes, 1998).…”

The Myth of the “Turn” in Contrastive Rhetoric

“…Of greater concern, particularly given the preponderant focus in contrastive-rhetoric research on East-West rhetorical contrasts, is that the characterization of Asian discourse as indirect serves merely to shore up old Orientalist assumptions about the mysterious East separated from the West by a great cultural divide. An increasing body of scholars therefore have gone further in laying bare certain intractable and fundamental problems of the contrastive-rhetoric project and in articulating alternative nondichotomizing and nonessentializing approaches to the crosscultural study of second-language writing (e.g., Cahill, 1999;Kowal, 1994Kowal, , 1998Kubota, 1997Kubota, , 1998Leki, 1997;Liebman, 1992;Liu, 1996;Raimes, 1998;Spack, 1997Spack, , 1998Zamel, 1997). …”

New Directions for Research in L2 Writing

“…Sixth, there is considerable debate about what constitutes a representative sampling of second language writing, whether brief tasks or students' written samples col1ected during a period of time (Hamp-Lyons, 1990;Henry, 1996;Raimes, 1998). Although in a few cases researchers collected a number of course-related assignments on the assumption that this procedure would be in consonance with ordinary class writing Zamel, 1983), the vast majority of studies, in line with the problem-solving approach followed (Pozo, 1989), opted for short timecompressed compositions.…”