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ecent scholarship tends to explain such influences as contributing to language hybridity---an advance over the traditional "deficit model." But Mao suggests that the "hybridity" approach is perhaps too arid or sanitized, missing rich nuances of mutual exchange, resistance, or even subversion. Through his concept of "togetherness in difference, Mao suggests that speakers of hybrid discourse may not be attempting the standard (and failing), but instead may be deliberately importing cultural material to create a distance between themselves and the standard. This practice, over time, becomes a process that transforms English, enriching and enlarging it through the infusion of non-Western discourse features, subverting power structures, and even providing unique humorous touches.

Of interest to scholars in composition, cultural studies, and linguistics as well, Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie leads in an important new direction for both our understanding and our teaching of English.

With the immersion method dominating contemporary language learning, the knowledge of traditional grammar is at a low ebb, creating real barriers to any student wanting to learning dead or historical languages. This revised edition of Reading Old English aims to equip readers (advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and autodidacts) with the necessary tools to read the oldest recorded forms of the English language by explaining key language features clearly and methodically, without simplifying any of the core grammatical concepts. It includes a number of helpful exercises, a variety of interesting and unusual Old English texts to translate, as well as appendices covering the basics of traditional grammar and sound changes in Old English, along with an introduction to poetic structure.
 

Brian Huot's aim for this book is both ambitious and provocative. He wants to reorient composition studies' view of writing assessment. To accomplish this, he not only has to inspire the field to perceive assessment--generally not the most appreciated area of study--as deeply significant to theory and pedagogy, he also has to counter some common misconceptions about the history of assessment in writing. In (Re)Articulating Writing Assessment, Huot advocates a new understanding, a more optimistic and productive one than we have seen in composition for a very long time. Assessment, as Huot points out, defines what is valued by a teacher or a society. What isn't valued isn't assessed; it tends to disappear from the curriculum. The dark side of this truth is what many teachers find troubling about large scale assessments, as standardized tests don't grant attention or merit to all they should. Instead, assessment has been used as an interested social mechanism for reinscribing current power relations and class systems.

Reclaiming Accountability brings together a series of critical case studies of writing programs that have planned, implemented, and/or assessed the impact of large-scale accreditation-supported initiatives. The book reimagines accreditation as a way to leverage institutional or programmatic change.

Contributions to the volume are divided into three parts. Part 1 considers how specialists in composition and rhetoric can work most productively with accrediting bodies to design assessments and initiatives that meet requirements while also helping those agencies to better understand how writing develops and how it can most effectively be assessed. Parts 2 and 3 present case studies of how institutions have used ongoing accreditation and assessment imperatives to meet student learning needs through programmatic changes and faculty development. They provide concrete examples of productive curricular (part 2) and instructional (part 3) changes that can follow from accreditation mandates while providing guidance for navigating challenges and pitfalls that WPAs may encounter within shifting and often volatile local, regional, and national contexts.

In addition to providing examples of how others in the profession might approach such work, Reclaiming Accountability addresses assessment requirements beyond those in the writing program itself. It will be of interest to department heads, administrators, writing program directors, and those involved with writing teacher education, among others.

Contributors: Linda Adler-Kassner, William P. Banks, Remica Bingham-Risher, Melanie Burdick, Polina Chemishanova, Malkiel Choseed, Kyle Christiansen, Angela Crow, Maggie Debelius, Michelle F. Eble, Jonathan Elmore, Lorna Gonzalez, Angela Green, Jim Henry, Ryan Hoover, Rebecca Ingalls, Cynthia Miecznikowski, Susan Miller-Cochran, Cindy Moore, Tracy Ann Morse, Joyce Magnotto Neff, Karen Nulton, Peggy O’Neill, Jessica Parker, Mary Rist, Rochelle Rodrigo, Tulora Roeckers, Shirley K. Rose, Iris M. Saltiel, Wendy Sharer, Terri Van Sickle, Jane Chapman Vigil, David M. Weed

For about two decades, say Johnson and Pace, the discussion of how to address prose style in teaching college writing has been stuck, with style standing in as a proxy for other stakes in the theory wars.

The traditional argument is evidently still quite persuasive to some—that teaching style is mostly a matter of teaching generic conventions through repetition and practice. Such a position usually presumes the traditional view of composition as essentially a service course, one without content of its own. On the other side, the shortcomings of this argument have been much discussed—that it neglects invention, revision, context, meaning, even truth; that it is not congruent with research; that it ignores 100 years of scholarship establishing composition's intellectual territory beyond "service."

The discussion is stuck there, and all sides have been giving it a rest in recent scholarship. Yet style remains of vital practical interest to the field, because everyone has to teach it one way or another.

A consequence of the impasse is that a theory of style itself has not been well articulated. Johnson and Pace suggest that moving the field toward a better consensus will require establishing style as a clearer subject of inquiry.

Accordingly, this collection takes up a comprehensive study of the subject. Part I explores the recent history of composition studies, the ways it has figured and all but effaced the whole question of prose style. Part II takes to heart Elbow's suggestion that composition and literature, particularly as conceptualized in the context of creative writing courses, have something to learn from each other. Part III sketches practical classroom procedures for heightening students' abilities to engage style, and part IV explores new theoretical frameworks for defining this vital and much neglected territory.

The hope of the essays here—focusing as they do on historical, aesthetic, practical, and theoretical issues—is to awaken composition studies to the possibilities of style, and, in turn, to rejuvenate a great many classrooms.

Yancey explores reflection as a promising body of practice and inquiry in the writing classroom. Yancey develops a line of research based on concepts of philosopher Donald Schon and others involving the role of deliberative reflection in classroom contexts. Developing the concepts of reflection-in-action, constructive reflection, and reflection-in-presentation, she offers a structure for discussing how reflection operates as students compose individual pieces of writing, as they progress through successive writings, and as they deliberately review a compiled body of their work-a portfolio, for example. Throughout the book, she explores how reflection can enhance student learning along with teacher response to and evaluation of student writing.

Reflection in the Writing Classroom will be a valuable addition to the personal library of faculty currently teaching in or administering a writing program; it is also a natural for graduate students who teach writing courses, for the TA training program, or for the English Education program.

Adler-Kassner and O'Neill show writing faculty and administrators how to frame discussions of writing assessment so that they accurately represent research-based practices, and promote assessments that are valid, reliable, and discipline-appropriate.

Public discourse about writing instruction is currently driven by ideas of what instructors and programs “need to do,” “should do,” or “are not doing,” and is based on poorly informed concepts of correctness and unfounded claims about a broad decline in educational quality. This discussion needs to be reframed, say Adler-Kassner and O'Neill, to help policymakers understand that the purpose of writing instruction is to help students develop critical thinking, reading, and writing strategies that will form the foundation for their future educations, professional careers, and civic engagement.

            Reframing Writing Assessment to Improve Teaching and Learning is grounded in the best of writing assessment research, and focuses on how to communicate it effectively to publics beyond academe.

Using the concept of the remix, Palmeri outlines practical pedagogical suggestions for how writing teachers can build upon this heritage with digital activities, assignments, and curricula that meet the needs of contemporary students. He details a pluralist vision of composition pedagogy that explains the ways that writing teachers can synthesize expressivist, cognitive, and social-epistemic approaches.

Palmeri reveals an expansive history of now forgotten multimodal approaches to composing moving images and sounds and demonstrates how current compositionists can productively remix these past pedagogies to address the challenges and possibilities of the contemporary digital era. A strikingly original take on the recent history of composition, Remixing Composition is an important work for the future of writing instruction in a digital age.
 

In Repurposing Composition, Shari J. Stenberg responds to the increasing neoliberal discourse of academe through the feminist practice of repurposing. In doing so, she demonstrates how tactics informed by feminist praxis can repurpose current writing pedagogy, assessment, public engagement, and other dimensions of writing education.

Stenberg disrupts entrenched neoliberalism by looking to feminism’s long history of repurposing “neutral” practices and approaches to the rhetorical tradition, the composing process, and pedagogy. She illuminates practices of repurposing in classroom moments, student writing, and assessment work, and she offers examples of institutions, programs, and individuals that demonstrate a responsibility approach to teaching and learning as an alternative to top-down accountability logic.

Repurposing Composition is a call for purposes of work in composition and rhetoric that challenge neoliberal aims to emphasize instead a public-good model that values difference, inclusion, and collaboration.

From scholars working in a variety of institutional and geographic contexts and with a wide range of student populations, Retention, Persistence, and Writing Programs offers perspectives on how writing programs can support or hinder students’ transitions to college. The contributors present individual and program case studies, student surveys, a wealth of institutional retention data, and critical policy analysis.

Rates of student retention in higher education are a widely acknowledged problem: although approximately 66 percent of high school graduates begin college, of those who attend public four-year institutions, only about 80 percent return the following year, with 58 percent graduating within six years. At public two-year institutions, only 60 percent of students return, and fewer than a third graduate within three years. Less commonly known is the crucial effect of writing courses on these statistics.

First-year writing is a course that virtually all students have to take; thus, writing programs are well-positioned to contribute to larger institutional conversations regarding retention and persistence and should offer themselves as much-needed sites for advocacy, research, and curricular innovation. Retention, Persistence, and Writing Programs is a timely resource for writing program administrators as well as for new writing teachers, advisors, administrators, and state boards of education.

Contributors: Matthew Bridgewater, ​Cristine Busser, Beth Buyserie, Polina Chemishanova, ​Michael Day, ​Bruce Feinstein, ​Patricia Freitag Ericsson, ​Nathan Garrett, ​Joanne Baird Giordano, ​Tawanda Gipson, ​Sarah E. Harris, Mark Hartlaub, ​Holly Hassel, ​Jennifer Heinert, ​Ashley J. Holmes, ​Rita Malenczyk, ​Christopher P. Parker, ​Cassandra Phillips, ​Anna Plemons, ​Pegeen Reichert Powell, ​Marc Scott, Robin Snead, ​Sarah Elizabeth Snyder, ​Sara Webb-Sunderhaus, ​Susan Wolff Murphy