The preparation of second-language students for the academic mainstream is discussed. Consideration is given to the essential role of personal experience in learning, language acquisition, and academic reading/writing and to assessment of the implications for the English-as-a-Second-Language classroom. (Contains 56 references.) (Author/LB)

Writing groups, used in many English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) composition classrooms, pose problems for some students from collectivistic cultures such as Japan and China. Suggested reasons are the individual benefit goal, the need for feedback rather than group harmony, and strained group dynamics. (Contains 41 references.) (Author/LB)

Process approaches are defined and their roles in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) and English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) writing instruction are discussed. Three different meanings of process are reviewed, the ESL/EFL writing literature is analyzed, and some problems in implementing process writing pedagogy are identified. (Contains 135…

Expert judgments of prompt difficulty in essay tests were examined to discover whether they could be used at the item-writing stage of test development. Findings show that "expert judges" share considerable agreement about prompt difficulty and prompt task type, but they cannot predict which prompts will result in high or low scores for…

Forty-three theoretically grounded reports of research and discussions of central issues in second- and foreign-language writing and writing instruction are compiled in this annotated bibliography. Covering the period April 1 through July 31, 1993, the citations are categorized as follows: writers, processes, texts, readers, context, instruction,…

The conceptual activities required in an organizational behavior course are analyzed to study how they determined the nature of discourse. It is argued that these activities can be transferred from the English for Academic Purposes classroom to university content courses and can help nonnative speakers adapt to those areas. (36 references)…

Using data from a large second-language (L2) text analysis (160 texts, 62 variables) in which automatic analysis was not used, it is demonstrated that a computer program designed for first-language texts is not accurate enough to capture completely the structures used by L2 writers. Suggestions are offered for an L2 text analysis program. (17…

A study of 170 first-year and 41 third-year Chinese university science majors suggests that first-year students had little familiarity with the Western notion of plagiarism, poor ability to recognize it, and less concern with the rights of the original writer. Third-year students had greater concern for the issue of honesty. The questionnaire is…

A study of Southeast Asian-American immigrants showed that English writing skills for mainstreamed students were the same at the eighth-, tenth-, and twelfth-grade levels and were the same as nonnative university students. Results suggest that age on arrival was a more important factor than number of years in United States and grade at entry. (21…