For English as a Second Language students, learning to write academically effective essays is an immense challenge because the students must obey linguistic conventions, write for an unfamiliar audience, and employ rhetorical strategies that the audience expects. In composition programs the special challenges that ESL students face are sometimes overlooked. In this dissertation I provide a rationale for developing ESL composition programs and concrete strategies for doing so. To account for, understand, and accommodate rhetorical expectations for American academic audiences, ESL students need information that acts as an interface between conventions in their countries and the conventions American academic readers expect. The study of popular culture allows ESL students to develop such information by helping them decipher aspects of the culture they are living in. Popular culture texts reflect everyday uses of language and commonly held views because they are produced for general American audiences. They reflect widely accepted rhetorical strategies because audiences demand that texts be written according to their expectations. The process of studying popular culture is liberating for ESL students because it integrates learning about academic essay writing with broader cultural concerns. I concentrate on three genres of popular culture texts: ads, because their use of rhetorical appeals is so clear and because their content suggests American values; formula fictions, because they portray popular role models and follow readers' expectations; and news articles, which show examples of discursive domains and structural conventions. I also make suggestions for using contrastive analyses to help students perceive differences and similarities in cultural expectations, and I demonstrate partial results through research and samples from student writing. By incorporating popular culture texts into the ESL composition curriculum, we help students learn to communicate their ideas in practical, accessible ways. It is by actively targeting American culture as a focus of study and helping students develop tools to analyze popular culture materials on their own that we can make effective changes in composition programs for ESL students.

The purpose of this study was to determine if a relationship exists between the knowledge and application of a writing scoring rubric to writing performance. Participants in a Minority Medical Education Program were given intense instruction in the use of the Medical Colleges Admissions Test Writing Sample scoring rubric. Scores from the participants' pretest and posttest were compared.

Most studies of higher education examine the university as either economically determined--relying on Louis Althusser's notion of ideological state apparatuses--or culturally determined--embracing either traditional or multicultural approaches. Alternatively, this dissertation blends postcolonial and Marxist theories to show that the U.S. public research university responds to the historical exigencies of a multivalent and dynamic political economy. I trace the evolution of this university system in conjunction with changes in the capitalist political economy and focus on the construction and reconstruction of the professional as the site of individual and collective agency. Chapters One and Two historicize the U.S. public research university system and argue that it has always been a vital component of the capitalist political economy. While the popular narrative of public higher education emphasizes civic preparation and upward mobility, these chapters demonstrate that supposedly egalitarian policies like the Morrill Land-Grant Act and the GI Bill serve the changing interests of capitalism. Such legislation forges and enables a university-produced professional class that functions both ideologically and structurally to facilitate transitions in the capitalist political economy. Mapping economic and cultural globalization onto the university system, Chapter Three discusses how contemporary university professionalization contributes to new methods for producing surplus value. Chapter Four examines how the U.S. public research university model circulates outside the United States, changing the global political economy as well as the production of surplus value in its wake. Focusing on a range of U.S. public research universities, I argue that the rhetoric and structure of mission statements move overseas through supranational organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and becomes implemented through policies attached to World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans. To conclude, Chapter Five develops specific strategies for the professional who opposes the capitalist logic of this global university system. Informed by Marxists scholars, like Althusser and Antonio Gramsci, critical pedagogues such as Paulo Freire, Peter McLaren, and Paula Allman, as well as the U.S. Third World politics of Chela Sandoval, Gayatri Spivak, and Edward Said, this chapter proposes concrete options for engaging and redirecting globalization.

This study examines the impact of service-learning on native and non-native English speaking college composition students. The general research question is: In what ways does participation in service-learning impact student learning? Specific research questions pertaining to the general categories of student writing performance, motivation, and social orientation, are as follows: (1) Does service-learning impact students' perception of self, school, community, and society? If so, how? (2) Do native and non-native English speaking students respond to service-learning similarly? Why or why not? (3) Are native and non-native English speaking students affected by service-learning similarly? Why or why not? (4) What other factors--such as learning style, previous experience with community service, and career goals--impact service-learning outcomes? (5) Does service-learning lead to improved student writing? If so, in what ways? The study consists of treatment and comparison groups of native and non-native English speaking students, for a total of four classes in the case study. Critical pedagogy, complexity theory, teacher research, experiential and service-learning theories provide the main theoretical rationales for the study. Data collection involved surveys, student interviews, participant observations, analysis of students' journal and essay writing, and course evaluations. Douglas Biber's (1988) multifeature/multidimensional approach to textual analysis was used, along with holistic and primary trait analyses of student texts to determine what, if any, impact service-learning had on the student's writing performance. The initial results document cognitive, sociocultural, and affective factors that contribute to the writing performance of linguistically and culturally diverse learners. Service-learning had a positive impact on participants' self-perception as members of the local community and on their personal agency in promoting social change. ESL students were especially enthusiastic about improved cross-cultural understanding and oral communication skills as a result of their community service. More students in the service-learning sections also thought their writing had improved as a result of the course than in the comparison sections, and independent assessments of their essays supported this view. Textual analysis of the students' writing found more situated and interactive features in the comparison essays than in service-learning essays, however.

This case study explores the experience of nonnative speakers of English enrolled in Freshman Composition at the University of Arizona, including the groups commonly identified as International and Resident Nonnative Speakers of English. This study examines the experiences of these groups in learning English, coming to the university, and making their way through freshman composition. A major goal of this study is to identify concrete pedagogical implications, including suggestions regarding placement, curriculum design, classroom teaching, and student support. Data were collected in 2 stages over a two-year period, from fall 2000 to spring 2002 and came from a variety of sources, including: (1) questionnaires; (2) classroom observation; (3) oral interviews with students, instructors, and administrators; (4) written materials from students and instructors. The results of the first stage of this study were primarily based on a questionnaire completed by 3,234 students attending freshman composition. This stage examined the characteristics of NNS attending composition courses designed for NNS and others attending courses designed for NS, finding important differences between these two groups in terms of their overall numbers, linguistic diversity, gender ratio, age, and L1/L2 language strength. The second stage of this study focused on 16 NS of Spanish. This stage of the study presented a more complex picture of the NNS experience, dividing these NNS into three orientations: U.S., Cross-border, and Mexico. This stage first examined the experiences of these students before their entrance to the university, finding differences in four areas: their perception of and relationship with the U.S./Mexico border, their language learning experiences at home, their language learning experiences at school, and their writing experiences before the university. The second stage investigated the university experiences the students in these three groups via eight themes that emerged over the course of the study, also finding many differences between these three orientations. These themes included how they were placed into composition courses, the culture shock they sometimes experienced, their behavior in the classroom, their writing difficulties, the writing they did in other classes and outside of the classroom, the resources available to them, and an analysis of their success.

<p> The American healthcare system has since WWII regularly suffered seasonal shortages of blood donations. This dissertation examines, through the theories of activity systems, genres, frames and social groups, the discourses and rhetoric associated with the practice and social activity of blood donation. The history of the discourse and the activities of intermediaries responsible for recruiting blood donors are examined focusing on significant discontinuities to the activity system of blood donation such as WWII; the shift to an all-volunteer, free donation system; and the threat to the system posed by the advent of HIV/AIDS. Altruism has been posited as "the" motivation for blood donation since the US moved to an all-volunteer donation system. In spite of assurances that the use of an all-volunteer system would result in an increase in blood donations, since 1974 shortages have regularly occurred but no other appeals have been officially tested or implemented by major intermediaries such as the American Red Cross or America's Blood centers. Reasons for this resistance to consider alternatives and possible changes to the system are examined to begin to develop ideas about ways that communication might help remedy these regular shortages.</p>

<p> Argumentation should be approached as a practice that is woven into the larger instructional practices across the core educational disciplines. With the advent of The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the ability to analyze and write an argument is now a predominant skill students are required to repeatedly demonstrate. As student achievement is now being used to reflect the larger portion of teacher accountability, it is essential that educators better understand how to make argumentation a disciplinary practice. I suggest that students should first be able to examine, identify, and understand the necessary function of evidence as a primary element of argumentation in order to more effectively construct a meaningful, sustainable argument. Through the categorization and analysis of explicit and implicit evidence, students are able to establish more meaningful claims. While this procedure elicits more student engagement and requires educators to reorient their instructional considerations, it also provides a practical starting point for all stakeholders when dealing with emerging argumentation in the classroom.</p>

<p> This study examines how Chinese philosophical values and rhetorical traditions that contribute to coherence differ from those prevalent in English. It attempts to discover how six Chinese ESL undergraduate participants demonstrate coherence in their persuasive writing, and how their practice of, and views toward coherence in writing change over a semester during which they are exposed to an American college writing classroom.</p><p> Three types of essays were collected for qualitative analysis in this study: a diagnostic departmental pre-test essay at the beginning of the semester, a final essay given as a post-test, and two drafts of a CATW (CUNY Assessment Test in Writing) practice essay that were written for the advanced writing course. In addition, data were also collected from a background questionnaire, a classroom observation, and two rounds of interviews during the course of a semester.</p><p> The study explored the features of coherence at both local (sentence) and global (discourse) levels. The knowledge of cohesion and coherence was employed to investigate how the Chinese learners of English achieved coherence within and beyond the paragraph level. The study discussed how the participants struggled to learn the appropriate use of explicit transitions and patterns of development to create a logical flow of ideas, how their writing generally cohered around one controlling idea throughout the essay, and how they changed their perceptions of coherence in an American university setting. The findings suggest that the Chinese ESL learners' writing quality could be improved in the Western context through coherence-related classroom instruction, revision practice, and teacher-student writing conferences, all aimed at helping them to understand Western notions of coherence while continuing to value their own cultural traditions.</p><p> The study's goal is to help both writing instructors and students; it is hoped that the findings of the study will help instructors to design appropriate writing instruction for such students, as well as helping the students to become familiar with coherence, in the process allowing them to get the most out of their college education and their efforts to improve at writing.</p>

This study addresses the need for research which examines collaborative writing using computers. Its purpose was to identify, through observation and description, distinctive features of collaborative composing with a computer. The study examines how three writers collaborated in writing using a personal computer. The group's writing sessions were recorded on audio tapes that were then transcribed for analysis. The analysis consisted of examining the data for patterns that might account for certain aspects of collaborative composition including how the group made decisions and negotiated their individual writing styles and strategies, and how the computer affected their writing processes. The analysis of the data identified variables specific to collaborative writing at the computer. The addition of these variables created new relationships among factors already found in individual composition. Further research is needed to determine more precisely how these factors interact. Suggestions for such research are included.

This thesis is a study of narratives by eighteen children 10 to 13 years old who live in an Algonquin community of Quebec. The narratives, primarily of children's personal experiences, were collected in peer groups, and were told in English, the children's second language. The specific contributions of children to each other's narratives were investigated and are described. The structural properties of a subset of the narratives were also examined using high point analysis (Peterson & McCabe, 1983). Findings resembled those reported for non-Aboriginal children with respect to the inclusion of the narrative elements of orientation, actions, and evaluation. However, the positioning of these elements and the low incidence of others resulted in differences in the structure of the narratives. Other aspects of the narratives considered include theme, narrator role, and the use of reported speech. The characteristics of the narratives are discussed as means by which the children in the study constructed and co-constructed narrative meaning. / Information on the functional dimensions of narratives in the community and on the sociocultural context in which the children live is also provided in order to facilitate the reader's appreciation of factors that influence children's narrative production.