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 [log in to unmask] To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/