This study examines the writing requirements and structures for administering writing at 54 small, selective liberal arts college. After a brief introduction to the theory and practice of writing across the curriculum, I place writing in the context of these small colleges. I base my research on these colleges' primary documents as well as data from an extensive qualitative survey in which all 54 schools participated. I define three of the most common types of writing requirements at these institutions: (1) Composition Courses in their different forms; (2) First-Year Seminars; and, (3) Writing Intensive Courses. I discuss the self-reported advantages and challenges of each approach. I focus on the role of writing in a liberal arts education and the distributed nature of teaching writing at such schools. I then offer an overall view of writing requirements and administrative structures at these schools, noting the advantages and challenges of teaching and administering writing in these distinctive institutional settings. Finally, I move towards developing a theory and practice of writing at the small liberal arts college and propose a framework for thinking about writing that helps cultivate an overall culture of writing. I suggest some "best practices" for writing at such colleges, and include recommendations for the structure of student writing experiences, support for faculty in the teaching of writing, and the administration and oversight of writing. I end with a vision of writing across the curriculum at the small liberal arts college that integrates teaching, writing, and learning.

The research and the study focus on the problem of dissociated learning. Why do students fail to connect with knowledge? The purposes of the study are: to summarize research pertaining to brain growth; to describe educational approaches and tactics consistent with this research; to test a brain research-based program designed to connect children to knowledge. The study rests on two research-based assumptions: strategies that connect dysfunctional or developmentally delayed students with thinking and learning will connect children in general with thinking and learning; educational activities integrating spatial information processing with linguistic processing will develop thinking skills more effectively than programs that do not. The apparent reason for the success of a spatial/linguistic program is that cross-modal activities mirror, or model, the integrated processes of the brain, impacting attention, emotion and logical operations. Increasing numbers of students fail to connect with writing. Many of these students can draw. Can drawing be used to connect these students to writing as thinking? The hypothesis is that a cross-modal activity combining drawing (a spatial activity) with writing (a linguistic activity) will develop descriptive, analytical and inferential thinking skills more effectively than a writing program that does not. The study targets children who receive special services, including those with language- and attention-related problems. To test the hypothesis, a quasi-experimental/control study was designed, involving 200 students in grades K, 3, 4, 5 and 6 in intact classrooms in two elementary schools. Approximately 2,000 pieces of data revealed a significant effect for the treatment, Drawing/Writing, on writing and thinking skills in the experimental group, including students who receive special services. The conclusions of the research are that brain research has relevance for education and that cross-modal activities provide antidotes to dissociated learning. The conclusion of the study is that, as a writing program, Drawing/Writing has broad usefulness and appeal.

Do graduate students from non-Western backgrounds have difficulties with analytical writing, or does the Western university have difficulty interpreting their ways of understanding the world? Both, according to the findings of this exploratory study at the Center for International Education at the University of Massachusetts. Based on interviews with seven professors who work extensively with international students and on interviews and writing samples of sixteen graduate students from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as on the author's observations as a teacher-researcher, this ethnographic study looks at what happens to mid-career professionals, some of them published writers in their own countries, when they try to modify their writing and thinking styles to produce "analytical" papers in the Western context. From the interviews and writing samples the author identifies ten issues that affect these students' writing. Educational and societal influences--the students' previous education, their knowledge of American language and culture, the communicative style taught by their own societies and their gender and status in their home countries--all may have been internalized since childhood, making them difficult for students to change in order to meet the demands of the American university. Writing and thinking strategies, on the other hand--their idea of how to discover the nature of truth, their treatment of authorities, their voice, and their sense of audience--are easier for students to work on. But as students change these writing and thinking strategies, they may find they need to abandon the ways their culture taught them to communicate. These changes often cause resistance, either to writing itself, or to feedback from professors, or to the university's assumption of the superiority of the Western world view. Just as resistance inhibits students from changing their writing style, students' writing "ability," or their need to express themselves and their willingness to work over and over a draft, tends to facilitate some students' struggles with "analysis." Students and researcher conclude that while international students need more support in understanding Western writing styles and world view, American professors also need to appreciate other styles of writing, thinking and communicating.

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Literacy as a process has been the object of study in different languages. Research has also been devoted to literacy development in bilingual settings both in native and second languages. Early bilingualism, has also been studied. However, the research in the area of biliteracy development, is scarce. This is the case study of a bilingual kindergarten child's journey through a year as she tries to accomplish biliteracy although formal literacy instruction was not provided in both languages. The data was gathered through participant observation at home, where Spanish was spoken, and at school, where English was the language of instruction. Informal and formal interviews where also used. Reading Miscue Inventories in English and Spanish were administered twice in the study. Parallels were found between the child's biliteracy development and the studies on literacy with monolingual children implying that literacy as a process is the same across and among languages. Through the process of constructing and reconstructing, through experimentation, creating and confirming hypotheses we observed the child's movement from nonstandard to standard spellings along with the exploration of different genres, styles and uses of writing. The child's strategies developed parallel across both languages, however where the languages differed, the strategies differed too. The child used decoding as an initial Spanish reading strategy because of an early exposure to a phonics approach to English reading, which she transferred to Spanish reading. When the child was exposed to other English reading strategies, she began to use these for Spanish reading. Finally, this study suggested that research findings in the area of bilingual language acquisition are congruent with the study of biliteracy development. Features such as language differentiation, influence of the environment over the language choice, audience sensitivity and the transfer of strategies from one language to another, are present in this study. The use of different theoretical approaches to literacy instruction, along with the need for maintenance programs of bilingual education where holistic theories of literacy instruction are exercised are educational practices recommended by this study.

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Eight families with Japanese mothers and English-speaking fathers were followed from the 1990s to 2007 as they strove to raise their children as bilinguals. The issues that were investigated were: (1) the language environments afforded; (2) factors influencing family decisions in creating those language environments; and, (3) conclusions about the efficacy of different language environments for raising bilingual children. Parental sacrifice was evident. Some mothers suppressed their native Japanese language and culture as they tried to afford their children solid backgrounds in what they considered a high-prestige language (English), while some fathers changed jobs in order to spend more time at home. Some families also moved in order to be near desirable schools. An optimal English environment at home was the key to success. Fathers spent quality time with their children every day, reading English books, doing homework together, talking about school activities, and reading bedtime stories. Families provided children with many English videos, DVDs, and other audiovisual sources. Summer travel to the father's country for summer camps and other enjoyable activities, especially spending time with English-speaking cousins, promoted positive images of English language and culture. Mothers faced issues of identity, power relations, and gender roles. The mothers' own experiences of learning English played a crucial role in the choices they made in raising their children as bilinguals. Typically, power relations between husbands and wives were determined by the wives' self-perception of being subordinate to their husbands. The results indicated that different theories of bilingual child-raising, no matter how stringently followed, did not seem to matter; what mattered was balancing the time the child spent with each parent. Usually before parents expected it, the child's own identity asserted itself in the pursuit of particular language environments, and progress toward fluency was sometimes erratic, as in the case of one boy whose development in both languages appeared to be delayed but who later was viewed as having native-speaker proficiency in both languages. Overall, more important than any particular method or theory, sustained sincere efforts and flexibility can produce bilingual children. / CITE/Language Arts