In these responses to each other's longer College Composition and Communication articles (also published in issue 46.1), Bartholomae and Elbow further explain their differing views of how to teach students and respond to their writing. Bartholomae advocates teaching students to take a critical stance toward dominant discourses and taking a critical stance when responding to students' papers. His goal is to help see "the ways their writing constructs a relationship with tradition, power and authority—with other people's words" (86). Elbow advocates "hold[ing] back" criticism of students' work to "let them make as many decisions as they can about their writing" (90). He recognizes that they "may be written by the culture" (90), but he values "the long-range benefits of helping students achieve their goals" (91).
Butler suggests that the markings that a teacher puts on a basic writer's paper mean little to the writer. The writer already knows that he or she is a weak writer, and these marks confirm this fact. While the comments are meaningful to the instructor, they are not meaningful to the writer. This essay encourages instructors to use comments on each student essay as a chance to encourage the writer and to meet one-on-one with students to help the student with specific problems within his or her writing.
Teacher commentary on student-written texts usually yields emotional reactions from students. For teachers to gain perspective on how students react to teachers' comments, Gay advocates a written dialogic interaction between teacher and student. Students should respond to teacher commentary immediately on receiving their drafts, even if reactions include anger, frustration, or confusion. In addition, students should be encouraged to initiate teacher commentary by writing a letter to the teacher in which they identify their goals for their text and their own perceived weaknesses and strengths as writers. Through this exercise, students learn to appreciate the dialogic nature of language and to appreciate a range of reader reactions to their written texts.
Gray-Rosendale and Leonard focus on one student, Leonard, who had successfully completed Northern Arizona University's STAR (Successful Transition and Academic Readiness) summer program and subsequently took Gray-Rosendale's ENG 105 class. The authors detail each assignment and cite examples from Leonard's writing. Along with an analysis of these texts, there are examples from and comments on both the teacher's and the student's responses. In many ways, this essay outlines a dialogue between teacher and student writer, as each responds—and continues to respond—to the other about the student's work. Carrying on such ongoing dialogues with our basic writing students, the authors say, "we will learn a great deal more about what students labeled as such think about their own writing, about Basic Writing as a discipline, and about the kind of scholarship we produce" (par. 62). Gray-Rosendale and Leonard call for not only the inclusion of student voices in our research and scholarship but also for a "place where student intervention and query is in fact the very foundation of our scholarly inquiry" (par. 66).
Basic writers are traditionally located outside the realm of academic discourse, which makes peer-response activities problematic for these writers because basic writers do not feel that they have sufficient authority to engage in criticism of other writers' work. Grobman attempts to correct this problem by introducing a peer-group leader—a sophomore who offers assistance and guidance to the students—into her first-year class's peer-response activities. Grobman concludes with a discussion of the pros and cons of employing such a leader in the basic writing classroom.
Students entering universities under open admissions typically did not possess the language skills necessary to participate in the analysis of writing required in traditional peer critiquing. Therefore, Hanson and Vogt created a model of peer editing that develops language skills through the integration of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Although the peer-editing procedure begins with a focus on content and structure, three-member peer groups spend extensive time on editing. Each writer reads his or her paper aloud, stopping after each sentence for peer comments on grammar and mechanics. Through the process of peer editing, reviewers and writers begin to recognize discrepancies between the writer's verbal representation of his or her text and the text itself and thus learn to catch their own errors. The integration of language skills involved in the process of peer editing allows writers to see the changes they need to make in their writing. The ability to distinguish one's own errors gives basic writers a critical voice and autonomy in their own learning.
Compositionists generally agree that what counts as an "error" in writing is often a failure to adhere to a set of arbitrary conventions—socially agreed on ways to make notations that create meaning. However, the history of the regularization of these conventions suggests that they favor the syntactic form of dialects spoken by the dominant social groups; that correctness in writing has to do with power, status, and class; and that pedagogies can contribute to a sense of powerlessness in speakers of nonstandard dialects. It might be more productive, then, to understand errors as representing flawed social transactions and a failure on the part of both the writer and the reader to negotiate an agreement about the significance that should be attributed to the written notations offered. Such an understanding would allow power to operate dialectically, and basic writers would make changes not to appease their instructors but to communicate particular meanings to particular readers.
Hull surveys research on and attitudes toward error and suggests pedagogical approaches to error. Acknowledging that the role of research in this area is to help provide access for underprepared students, Hull discusses the changes in attitudes toward error that make possible an informed pedagogy focused on inclusion. Revision is reformulation rather than surface polishing. Research is beginning to focus on error as a cognitive process. Hull identifies key articles on the history of attitudes toward error; the relationships among power, status, race and class; and the desire of inexperienced writers to conform to conventions. There has been "a movement away from a concern solely for correctness and toward an interest in rhetoric" (171). The article categorizes and analyzes research on the mental processes involved in making errors. It includes research on error counts, error categories, and possible sources of error, arguing that errors should be treated from a developmental perspective. Another subtopic is research on editing, which typically includes protocol analysis and interviews. Research demonstrates that "students can learn to edit through repeated acts of locating errors and imagining alternatives to them in contrast to learning about errors in the abstract in hopes of somehow inhibiting them" (181). The article ends with recommendations for further research on error that will increase "outsiders'" access.