California City is the beginning of a novel. The narrator, Jane, returns to her hometown in the Mojave Desert upon the death of her close friendâs child. The town was established in the 1950âs when a developer acquired land and built a town that he believed would become Californiaâs next big metropolis. A population of 9,000 people inhabits the town now, but paved roads stretch out for 200 square miles. Land-wise, it is second in size only to Los Angeles. Jane and her friends used to believe in a brand of Christianity that emphasized miraculous healings and resurrections. Her friends are praying that the child will be raised. Jane spends time with her parents and old friends and recalls the strange stories of the people she knew in California City. Also included are three short stories: âUp Birch Creek,â âTreeâd,â and âMarried.â Each of these takes place in Montana. In âUp Birch Creek,â a 30-year-old restaurant hostess returns to the place where her family homesteaded. In âTreeâd,â a young girl goes mountain lion hunting with strangers. In âMarried,â a young married woman begins to lose her mind after some pencil lead becomes lodged in the skin of her infant daughter.

This study was conducted to compare the writing performance (writing products and writing processes) of the TOEFL iBT integrated writing task (writing from source texts) with that of the TOEFL iBT independent writing task (writing from prompt only). The study aimed to find out whether writing performance varies with task type, essay scores, and academic experience of test takers, thus clarifying the link between the expected scores and the underlying writing abilities being assessed. The data for the quantitative textual analysis of written products was provided by Educational Testing Service (ETS). The data consisted of scored integrated and independent essays produced by 240 test takers. Coh-Metrix (an automated text analysis tool) was used to analyze the linguistic features of the 480 essays. Statistic analysis results revealed the linguistic features of the essays varied with task type and essay scores. However, the study did not find significant impact of the academic experience of the test takers on most of the linguistic features investigated. In analyzing the writing process, 20 English as a second language students participated in think-aloud writing sessions. The writing tasks were the same tasks used in the textual analysis section. The writing processes of the 20 participants was coded for individual writing behaviors and compared across the two writing tasks. The writing behaviors identified were also examined in relation to the essay scores and the academic experience of the participants. Results indicated that the writing behaviors varied with task type but not with the essay scores or the academic experience of the participants in general. Therefore, the results of the study provided empirical evidence showing that the two tasks elicited different writing performance, thus justifying the concurrent use of them on a test. Furthermore, the study also validated the scoring rubrics used in evaluating the writing performance and clarified the score meaning. Implications of the current study were also discussed.

Not Applicable.

A Special Relativity is the story of a family living in Orange County, California. The novella takes place during one summer. Vanden Westbeautiful and cruelhas just returned home from college on the East Coast to find that her new family in California is entirely different from the one she left behind. Her widowed mother, Lori West, has remarried Americorp CEO and multi-millionaire Howard Moore, whose stepdaughter Elizabeth Moore is Vandens new stepsister. Vandens mother and her new husband are rarely in the country, leaving Vanden and Elizabeth mostly unsupervised in an environment ridden with temptation. The girls zigzag through Southern California with Vandens wild friends, experimenting with drugs, recklessness, and a blasé attitude toward sex. Surrounded by adults who seem alarmingly lifeless and filled with a frightening apathy toward their environment Vanden and her friends seek out anything that will make them feel alive. Immersed in a world of dizzying wealth and a fanatical obsession with beauty, Elizabeth is transformed from modest, inconspicuous, and well-behaved, to thrill-seeking, spontaneous, and apathetic. Meanwhile, a tragic act of neglect leaves the child in Vandens care dead. Beneath the glittering surface of the West familys lavish lifestyle and behind the barriers this guarded family has erected for themselves, Vanden learns that there is more to her new family than meets the eyeincluding a long-buried secret involving her deceased father. Ultimately, in this world of uniformly blue skies, all becomes relative: truth, morality, self.

This paper explores the history of Robert L. Vann Elementary, an elementary school in Pittsburghs Hill District, which was once one of the highest achieving schools in the city. During Vanns most successful years, Principal Doris Brevard implemented specific procedures and developed rules to ensure that Vann studentswho were predominantly black and impoverishedwould achieve at the highest level. After Brevards retirement in 1995, and a series of educational reform laws and practices were put into effect, Vanns success ended. This paper examines why those changes occurred and questions if the practices that principal Brevard once used could be put into place today to close the achievement gap between black and white students.

Thesis (M.A. Cr. Wr.)--University of Queensland, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.

An appropriate representation of self is crucial in reporting past research, establishing a committed writer stance, and persuading the reader in academic writing. While research has suggested an underuse of authorial reference in student writing at the university level, less attention has been devoted to students preparing to enter university. In this study, I seek to investigate students’ usage and perceptions of reporting verbs along a continuum of authorial power at a community college in Hong Kong. Based on a revised averral framework by Charles (2006b) and the reporting verb taxonomy by Hyland (2002a), an analysis was performed on 614 academic written assignments (compared with proficient writing by native-speaking students in the UK in both frequency and textual examination), 697 questionnaires, and interviews with 13 students and three teachers. Findings reveal that the community college students were impassioned opinion holders characterized by an overuse of first person I in a cognitive, affective, and factive fashion. However, they overlooked the potential of ‘mitigated’ expressions of self-mention (such as it is argued that) and discourse verbs such as argue and suggest to develop an argumentative ethos and dialogic interaction essential in effective reader engagement. A misunderstanding of the purpose of academic writing, an insensitivity to reporting verbs, and a categorical forbiddance of self-mention by teachers appear to be the main reasons for not further developing a writer presence by Hong Kong students. In view of the low language proficiency of the students, conflicting writing guides, and teachers’ nonchalance about providing help, teaching recommendations were offered with the use of learner corpora and non-academic materials. / published_or_final_version / Applied English Studies / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the effectiveness of teaching students to write essays using a multi-cue decision-making strategy that asked students to Inscribe the writing space, Define the rhetorical problems locally, Discover the information necessary to solve the local rhetorical problems, and Link the individual units of the essay logically (IDDL). An explanatory mixed methods research design was employed to investigate the importance of using direct explicit instruction of single-cue writing strategies. The research questions were: what is the effect of teaching first-year university students single-cue heuristics as measured by their growth in essay writing between a pretest and posttest measure? and, what is the effect of teaching first-year university students single-cue heuristics as measured by their final essay grades at the end of term? A total of 99 students, divided into control (22 students) and experimental (77 students) groups, participated in the quantitative data collection by providing pretest and posttest writing samples. In the qualitative data collection phase, twenty students (ten from each group) were individually interviewed. While the results indicated that the control group outperformed the experimental group on all measures, except content, there were a number of confounding variables that require further investigation.

poetry

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