Recent research in educational practice has identified and emphasized the value of connecting school curriculum to the personal experiences of the students; but to be effective, learners must possess a collection of baseline experiences the teacher can connect new learnings to. If the baseline experiences are lacking, the instructor could choose to create a classroom experience upon which to build additional learnings.

This thesis suggests that the idea of the rhetorical situation-a work's text (or language), author, audience, and social context-can serve as a connection between literature, literary theory, and composition studies. Criticisms of Emily Dickinson's Poem 754 are presented, and each is categorized according to the element of the rhetorical situation upon which it focuses.

In this subjective hero concept lies an intriguing aspect of Bakhtin's paradigm: A hero is not necessarily a living entity; a hero can be ideas, objects and locations. When viewed through the lens of traditional western rhetorical theory, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea appears as a monologue wherein Santiago seemingly speaks for the author about the subject of doom and man's relationship to the world.

This project shows how web tools can be effectively integrated into the community college composition curriculum through staff development. It shows the need for adaptation of materials designed for K-12 education to the community college level and the development of grade-appropriate materials using web resources. The need for authentic assessment is explored and the means to prove it were supplied. Examples of web tools, sites for developing web tools and resources for accessing and applying authentic assessment tools were given.

This thesis suggests the incorporation of "Genre Theory" into First Year Composition (FYC) at California State University (CSUSB) as a means of alleviating the lack of transfer of what is learned in FYC to other university writing. In examing the feasibility of that incorporation, it takes into consideration the demands made on the FYC course across universities and specifically at CSUSB.

This project creates an interactive website on the literature surrounding reading and concept acquisition skills in adult learners. This website used in conjunction with the Basic Skills English 10A course given in community colleges will enhance reading and concept acquisitions skills enabling student the self cofidence, encouragement and motivation to complete the course.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / While a writing center tutor may view her role as a coach, a commentator, and a counselor, the tutor actually serves as scaffolding, a temporary, supportive replacement of the processes more experienced writers can manage alone without a tutor, namely, the metacognitive processes of self-assessing, self-monitoring, and self-motivating. Metacognition then becomes the essential factor in adapting writing center practices into the composition classroom. By re-conceptualizing the three roles of a writing center tutor and re-visioning the classroom into a more “pure” learning space, tutor-teachers improve students’ writing skills, increase their engagement, and redirect students’ focus toward the writing process rather than the grade. To demonstrate the efficacy of this adapted writing center approach in the composition classroom, I created an authentic, challenging project in which the pre-project activities, task design, work process, and reflection assignment enact my proposed theory. By adopting this approach, tutor-teachers ultimately empower students and design compositional tasks that act as a catalyst for transforming the way students understand themselves as writers and as students.

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This study examines how post-process theories are being defined, negotiated, and enacted in composition classrooms. While recognizing that most composition instruction remains shaped by modern and process oriented theories, this research asks how post-process considerations might be currently informing teaching practices in some classrooms.

This research study examines the relationship between conjunctive cohesion and relational coherence in students' narrative and expository compositions and writing quality (here defined in terms of teachers' ratings). Altogether 64 compositions were analysed using Halliday and Hasan's (1976) cohesion theory and Crombie's (1985) set of interpropositional relations. The results of the study show that both conjunctive cohesion density and relational coherence, as defined by the density of contiguous functional relations, affect perceptions of writing quality. Writers of low-rated narrative and low-rated expository compositions not only used a more limited range of conjunctives but their compositions manifested less cohesion density and contiguous relation density than writers of high-rated narrative and expository compositions did. / Linguistics / M. A. (Applied Linguistics)