CCCC 2001 in Denver has a lot to interest ATEG.

Janet Gilbert has arranged for two positions on the CCCC program at the
Adam's Mark Hotel.

One is the Caucus on Language beginning at 6:45 pm on Thursday, March 15.
The title of the session is "Applying Research on Language to Teaching
Composition."   Brock Haussamen, President of ATEG and author of Revising
the Rules, will talk on "Public Grammar, Private Grammar," exploring the
wide divisions that plague the field of grammar education.  There is no
extra charge, but usually after a lively discussion, many attendees at the
Caucus go out to dinner together to continue their discussion.  

The other activity is new: a workshop from 9:00 am to 12:30 pm on
Wednesday, March 14.  It is Workshop MW6:  Conversations about Working with
Language in Composition Classes.  The workshop will begin with a brief
overview of some shared understandings the caucus has been generating about
how the most relevant aspects of work in linguistics relate to the field of
composition and about how to apply these in productive ways in composition
classrooms.  The leaders of each of five small working groups will
introduce their plans for their group.  Participants will work with the
groups of their first and second choices.  Afterwards, new questions and
issues generated by the working group sessions will be brought up in the
large closing discussion.

Working group leaders and their focuses are as follows:

Eleanor Kutz, University of Massachusetts, Boston -- Analyzing
Conversations in Discourse Communities
This group will do some discourse analysis using student-generated taped
conversations and transcriptions from varied discourse communities.  The
goal is to guide participants through a mini-version of the kind of work
freshmen writers do to build a working sense of how language works in
social context and to develop metaknowledge about language that students
can use in new academic discourse contexts.  Kutz will draw on the work of
Gumperz, Gee, and Halliday and will relate the implications of this grammar
to genre theory.  

Carolyn Hartnett, College of the Mainland, Texas City, TX -- Making Meaning
First through Language Choices
Participants will apply an efficient shortcut that students can use to
identify sentence structure in given example texts.  Then they will divide
the verbs into three basic types of meaning as distinguished by M. A. K.
Halliday.  They will analyze the distinctive characteristics and effects of
each type to determine where and  why each is rhetorically most effective
for meaning, cohesion, and emphasis in the particular language situation. 
Then they can revise the verbs in a text to make it serve a different
purpose.  

Mary Ann Crawford, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant --
Understanding Citations as Evolving Literacy Practices
This group will consider citation practices as interactive and
knowledge-making conversations.  It will demonstrate how teachers can help
students understand the practices to position themselves as both insiders
and outsiders in discourse communities.

Arthur Palacas, University of Akron, OH -- Grammatical Underpinnings for a
Situated Study of African American English in Student Writing
Teachers can improve their ability to diagnose and discuss grammatical,
structural, and stylistic differences in the classroom with a newfound
ability to defend the idea that Black English is, from a syntactic point of
view, a different language.  Ample student examples will be discussed.  For
a preview of Palacas' thinking, see his article in the January, 2001, issue
of College English, "Liberating American Ebonics from Euro-English."  

Janet R. Gilbert, Delta College, Frankfort, MI -- Building Writing Skill
upon Recurring Patterns from Sentence and Discourse Units
Participants will observe recently recognized relationships in design among
language units on different levels (word group, sentence, paragraph,
discourse).  They will explore ways to apply these insights to help
students manage unfamiliar language patterns in unfamiliar academic
discourse.  

Registration is limited, so sign up early by adding Workshop MW6 to your
conference registration by mail.  A $20 fee is required.

Carolyn Hartnett
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