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Statistical and anecdotal evidence documents that even states with relatively little ethnic or cultural diversity are beginning to notice and ask questions about long-term resident immigrants in their classes. As shifts in student population become more widespread, there is an even greater need for second language specialists, composition specialists, program administrators, and developers in colleges and universities to understand and adapt to the needs of the changing student audience(s).

Classrooms filled with glassy-eyed students provide an experiential base for Alice S. Horning’s new com­prehensive theory about basic writers.

Horning explores the theory of writing acquisi­tion in detail. Her examination of spoken and writ­ten language and redundancy give a theoretical base to her argument that academic discourse is a sepa­rate linguistic system characterized by particular psycholinguistic features. She proposes that basic writ­ers learn to write as other learners master a second language because for them, academic written Eng­lish is a whole new language.

She explores the many connections to be found in second language acquisition research to the teaching and learning of writing and gives special attention to the interlanguage hypothesis, pidginization theory, and the Monitor theory. She also addresses the role of affective factors (feelings, attitudes, emotions, and motivation) in the success or failure of writing students.

Teaching/Writing in Thirdspaces: The Studio Approach examines a dynamic approach to teaching composition that reimagines not only the physical space in which writing and learning occurs but also the place occupied by composition in the power structure of universities and colleges.

In response to financial and programmatic cutbacks at the University of South Carolina in the 1990s, authors Rhonda C. Grego and Nancy S. Thompson used their academic backgrounds in composition and English education, along with their personal histories in working-class families, to look at compositional spaces and places with an eye to challenging the embedded issues of race, class, and gender within the university hierarchies. The result was a supplemental writing program that they called the writing studio.

The studio model emphasizes individual participation in a small group that allows students to present work they are preparing for outside classes, discuss their challenges, and refine their ideas with other students and staff facilitators. This “interactional inquiry” is replicated and reinforced by the facilitators, who meet in their own small groups to analyze larger patterns, possibilities, and needs as they arise in their studios.

Grego and Thompson argue that because the studio is physically and institutionally “outside but alongside” both students’ other coursework and the hierarchy of the institution, it represents a “thirdspace,” a unique position in which to effect institutional change. The focus on interactional inquiry challenges traditional power hierarchies within classrooms and shifts the nature of discourse. As a bottom-up approach to the development of educational programs within institutions that have different needs, demographies, and histories, the studio model can address a multitude of different institutional needs with little disruption to the curriculum.

The studio model allows university administrators, teachers, student aides, and students to continually adapt to changing institutional environments with new teaching and learning strategies. Teaching/Writing in Thirdspaces provides an alternative approach to traditional basic writing courses that can be adopted in educational institutions of all types and at all levels.

This is the first book-length study of the status of composition in English studies and the uneasy relationship between composition and literature. Composition studies and institutional histories of English studies have long needed this kind of clarification of the historical and political contexts of composition teaching, research, and administration.

Susan Miller argues that composition constitutes a major national industry, citing the four million freshman-level students enrolled in such courses each year, the $40 million annual expenditure for textbooks, and the more than $50 million in teacher salaries. But this concrete magnitude is not expressed in political power within departments. Miller calls on her associates in composition to engage in a persistent critique of the social practices and political agenda of the discipline that have been responsible for its institutional marginalization. Drawing on her own long experience as a composition administrator, teacher, and scholar, as well as on a national survey of composition professionals, Miller argues that composition teachers inadvertently continue to foster the negative myth about composition’s place in the English studies hierarchy by assuming an assigned, self-sacrificial cultural identity. Composition has been regarded as subcollegiate, practical, a "how-to," and has been denied intellectual rigor in order to preserve literature’s presentations of quasi-religious textual ideals.

The ESL Writer’s Handbook is a reference work for ESL students who are taking college-level courses. Because its purpose is to provide help with the broad variety of writing questions students may have when working on school assignments, the text focuses on

English for Academic Purposes. Unlike other handbooks on the market, this book’s sole purpose is to address the issues of second language learners.

This spiral-bound Handbook complements a student writer’s dictionary, thesaurus, and grammar reference book. It would be suitable as a text for an advanced ESL writing course when used together with the companion Workbook (978-0-472-03404-8). The Handbook is concise and easily navigated; is accessible, with clear and direct explanatory language; features information on both APA and MLA styles (including a sample paper for each); and includes many examples from ESL student writers to provide realistic models.

            Included as special features in the Handbook are:

•         The topic selection is based on ESL writers’ needs as observed by the authors over many years.

•         The coverage of topics is more complete than the limited amount usually provided for ESL writers in first language or L1 handbooks.

•         The explanatory language is appropriate for ESL students, in contrast to the more complex and idiomatic language of other English handbooks.

•         The level of detail is more manageable for ESL students, compared to what is in other English handbooks.

Tounderstand the history of "English," Ross Winterowd insists, one must understand how literary studies, composition-rhetoric studies, and influential textbooks interrelate. Stressing the interrelationship among these three forces, Winterowd presents a history of English studies in the university since the Enlightenment.

Winterowd’s history is unique in three ways. First, it tells the whole story of English studies: it does not separate the history of literary studies from that of composition-rhetoric studies, nor can it if it is going to be an authentic history. Second, it traces the massive influence on English studies exerted by textbooks such as Adventures in Literature, Understanding Poetry, English in Action, and the Harbrace College Handbook. Finally, Winterowd himself is very much a part of the story, a partisan with more than forty years of service to the discipline, not simply a disinterested scholar searching for the truth.

After demonstrating that literary studies and literary scholars are products of Romantic epistemology and values, Winterowd further invites controversy by reinterpreting the Romantic legacy inherited by English departments. His reinterpretation of major literary figures and theory, too, invites discussion, possibly argument. And by directly contradicting current histories of composition-rhetoric that allow for no points of contact with literature, Winterowd intensifies the argument by explaining the development of composition-rhetoric from the standpoint of literature and literary theory.

The Idea of a Writing Laboratory is a book about possibilities, about teaching and learning to write in ways that can transform both teachers and students.

            Author Neal Lerner explores higher education’s rich history of writing instruction in classrooms, writing centers and science laboratories. By tracing the roots of writing and science educators’ recognition that the method of the lab––hands-on student activity—is essential to learning, Lerner offers the hope that the idea of a writing laboratory will be fully realized more than a century after both fields began the experiment.    

            Beginning in the late nineteenth century, writing instructors and science teachers recognized that mass instruction was inadequate for a burgeoning, “non-traditional” student population, and that experimental or laboratory methods could prove to be more effective. Lerner traces the history of writing instruction via laboratory methods and examines its successes and failures through case studies of individual programs and larger reform initatives. Contrasting the University of Minnesota General College Writing Laboratory with the Dartmouth College Writing Clinic, for example, Lerner offers a cautionary tale of the fine line between experimenting with teaching students to write and “curing” the students of the disease of bad writing. 

            The history of writing within science education also wends its way through Lerner’s engaging work, presenting the pedagogical origins of laboratory methods to offer educators in science in addition to those in writing studies possibilities for long-sought after reform. The Idea of a Writing Laboratory compels readers and writers to “don those white coats and safety glasses and discover what works” and asserts that “teaching writing as an experiment in what is possible, as a way of offering meaning-making opportunities for students no matter the subject matter, is an endeavor worth the struggle.”