Literate acts - Constructing negotiated meaning - Construction as a metaphor for meaning making - Construction sites : observations of meaning making in learning, development, and literacy - Collaborative planning : an educator's account of a constructive process - Welcome to college : construction and negotiation in a freshman class - Strategic knowledge and the logic of a learner - Metacognition : a strategic response to thinking - Reflection and the reconstruction of a literate practice.

Flowers describes how writers construct meaning and examines "negotiation" as an alternative to the metaphors of "reproduction" and "conversation" in describing the writing process. She supports her argument by reviewing an emerging body of social and cognitive research in the area. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Bringing together the voices of a diverse group of scholars and language professionals, this edited collection, concerned with the cultivation of plurilingualism in multilingual educational settings, builds on the theory and practice of linguistic and cultural mediation both as curricular content and social practice. The chapters view mediation as an important aspect of communication which involves dynamic, purposeful interactivity, implicating social agents in the negotiation and construction of socially situated meanings across different languages and within the same language. Theoretically informed chapters present views on mediation as well as contributors’ research and project outcomes in educational interventions. They also describe how mediation has been incorporated in educational practices and how it materialises in social contexts. Ultimately, this book makes the case for why mediation constitutes a key competence to be developed for active global and local citizenry in today’s societies where there is an increased rate of knowledge acquisition and exchange. Presenting research from classrooms and other multilingual environments, this book offers concrete suggestions for the development of language users/learners’ ability to mediate within and across languages. It will appeal to scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of language and education, education policy and politics, bilingualism and plurilingualism more generally. Curriculum designers may also find the volume of use.

Offering a comparative analysis of “community-literacy studies," Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics traces common values in diverse accounts of “ordinary people going public.” Elenore Long offers a five-point theoretical framework. Used to review major community-literacy projects that have emerged in recent years, this local public framework uncovers profound differences, with significant consequence, within five formative perspectives: 1) the guiding metaphor behind such projects; 2) the context that defines a “local” public, shaping what is an effective, even possible performance, 3) the tenor and affective register of the discourse; 4) the literate practices that shape the discourse; and, most signficantly, 5) the nature of rhetorical invention or the generative process by which people in these accounts respond to exigencies, such as getting around gatekeepers, affirming identities, and speaking out with others across difference.

In a time of declining resources in institutions of higher education, we grapple with how priorities are to be set for the limited resources available. Most vulnerable are those students labeled underprepared by colleges and universities. Should we argue that the limited resources available ought to be used to support these students through their undergraduate years? And, if we decide that we want to do that, what evidence of their potential for success can we provide that will justify the use of these resources? Through longitudinal research that follows students who have been so labeled over all their college years, we can begin to find answers to these questions. Time to Know Them is the first book that follows the experiences of a group of students over their entire academic experience. No previous studies have brought together the factors incorporated in this study: *examining writing and learning on a true longitudinal basis; *studying a multicultural urban population; *investigating the relationship between writing and learning by examining papers written over time for regularly assigned academic courses across a range of disciplines; and *taking into consideration non-academic factors that influence academic performance such as race, gender, socio-economic status, and ideological orientation. Through interviews twice a semester over six years, the collection of papers written for all courses, observations of instructional settings, and analysis of required institutional tests of writing, the author has been able to pull together a more complete picture of writing and intellectual development over the college years than has previously been available in any study. Students are seen to acquire the ability to handle more complex reasoning tasks as they find themselves in more challenging intellectual settings and where risk-taking and exploration of new ideas are valued. The integration of students' previous life experiences into their academic studies allows them to analyze, critique, modify, and apply their previously held world views to their new learning. These changes are seen to occur over time with instructional settings and support providing key roles in writing development. Personal factors in students' lives present difficulties that require persistence and dedication to overcome. Never before have the complexities of real individual lives as they affect academic performance been so clearly presented.

In Dialectical Rhetoric, Bruce McComiskey argues that the historical conflict between rhetoric and dialectic can be overcome in ways useful to both composition theory and the composition classroom. Historically, dialectic has taken two forms in relation to rhetoric. First, it has been the logical development of linear propositions leading to necessary conclusions, a one-dimensional form that was the counterpart of rhetorics in which philosophical, metaphysical, and scientific truths were conveyed with as little cognitive interference from language as possible. Second, dialectic has been the topical development of opposed arguments on controversial issues and the judgment of their relative strengths and weaknesses, usually in political and legal contexts, a two-dimensional form that was the counterpart of rhetorics in which verbal battles over competing probabilities in public institutions revealed distinct winners and losers. The discipline of writing studies is on the brink of developing a new relationship between dialectic and rhetoric, one in which dialectics and rhetorics mediate and negotiate different arguments and orientations that are engaged in any rhetorical situation. This new relationship consists of a three-dimensional hybrid art called “dialectical rhetoric,” whose method is based on five topoi: deconstruction, dialogue, identification, critique, and juxtaposition. Three-dimensional dialectical rhetorics function effectively in a wide variety of discursive contexts, including digital environments, since they can invoke contrasts in stagnant contexts and promote associations in chaotic contexts. Dialectical Rhetoric focuses more attention on three-dimensional rhetorics from the rhetoric and composition community.

Composition studies is a rapidly growing and constantly changing field. At present, however, graduate students new to the field and writing teachers who want to make new connections between theory and practice have little choice of current reference works that define key terms in composition studies and provide information about the scholars and researchers who have shaped and are shaping the discipline. This book supplies this information in an easily accessible format and places both scholars and terms in the context of the field's development. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for 108 individuals who have developed the field and 128 terms central to the discipline. The first part of the book provides entries for leaders in composition studies. Each entry identifies the areas in which the scholar has contributed most influentially to the field and provides both a chronological overview of the person's contributions and a bibliography of representative works. The second part includes entries for terms that are problematic both for newcomers and for those already familiar with the discipline. The entries for the terms show how the disciplinary context has shaped the ways in which they have been used. The entries also indicate how established thinkers in composition studies and other disciplines have explained or defined the terms, provide examples of the terms in context, and list scholars often associated with them. An appendix includes entries for scholars from other disciplines who have contributed to the field.

Winner of the AAAL Book Award 2015 Winner of the Modern Language Association's Thirty-Third Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize Winner of the BAAL Book Prize 2014 Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations introduces a new way of looking at the use of English within a global context. Challenging traditional approaches in second language acquisition and English language teaching, this book incorporates recent advances in multilingual studies, sociolinguistics, and new literacy studies to articulate a new perspective on this area. Canagarajah argues that multilinguals merge their own languages and values into English, which opens up various negotiation strategies that help them decode other unique varieties of English and construct new norms. Incisive and groundbreaking, this will be essential reading for anyone interested in multilingualism, world Englishes and intercultural communication.

At a time of increasing globalisation, the concept of open and distance learning is being constantly redefined. New technologies have opened up new ways of understanding and participating in Learning. Distributed Learning offers a collection of perspectives from a social and cultural practice-based viewpoint, with contributions from leading international authors in the field. Key issues in this comprehensive text are: *the challenges of ICT to traditional teaching and learning practices *the value and relevance of 'activity theory' and 'communities of practice' in educational institutions and the workplace *perspectives on the relationship between globalisation and distributed learning, and the breakdown of distinctions between global and local contexts *issues of identity and community in designing courses for the virtual student *language and literacies in distributed learning contexts This book provides useful introductory reading, building a sound theoretical framework for practitioners interested in how distributed learning is shaping post-compulsory education.