Teaching English in the Two-Year College - Volume 24, Issue 2, 1997

Diane Allen, in "Tapping the Sources Within: A Three-Step Approach", gives a strategy for helping basic writing students develop better essays with stronger voices.

Describes how a cooperative program between a community college (Spokane Falls) and a university (Eastern Washington) produced a successful teaching internship. Finds that, besides the ways in which interns learn from the experience, working with interns can benefit community college educators and offer them an opportunity for self-assessment and for introspection concerning their own planning and teaching.

Relates how an English teacher, a fan of Willa Cather, searches for Cather’s past in the physical environment, the Nebraska prairie, which formed her as a person and an author. Shows how this search led the teacher to examine her own past.

Discusses how to teach a first-year composition course, expository writing, required of most students at Rensselaer Polytechnic. Considers how to motivate students and help them to see connections between writing and their technical work. Offers various techniques for getting the students to write comfortably.

Considers why basic writers write in "phrases patched upon phrases." Examines how language is patterned and acquired to clarify a framework for teaching basic writers. States that speaking and writing, two different ways of organizing and presenting information, have different structures. Explores what cognitive psychology can say about how the mind processes and produces language.

Recounts a veteran instructor’s experiences with teaching new subjects, American literature and poetry writing, after many years away from graduate school. Muses about the reality of teaching undergraduates. Considers teaching as a rhetorical act and finds that learning is more likely to occur when teachers approach teaching as a rhetorical act rather than an enactment of theory.

What Is Composition and Why Do We Teach It? A Review Essay; Teachers, Discourses, and Authority in the Postmodern Composition Classroom; When Writing Teachers Teach Literature: Bringing Writing to Reading; Science and Technology Today: Readings for Writers; Writing Off Center: An American Issues Reader for Composition; The Shape of Ideas; Border Talk: Writing and Knowing in the Two-Year College.