ABSTRACT
Composition faculty regularly encounter sentences, paragraphs, and essays, which, to varying degrees, are not consistent with the expectations of college writing. Such discoveries require responses-both to the contents of such pieces, and to the lexical and syntactic choices made by the student writer. Of course, these responses are inevitably informed by what faculty believe about language, its nature and capacity to represent what its users think (if perhaps not how they think), as well as their ideas about how language should be used. Th ese beliefs may be explicit, implicit, or even inchoate, and, thus, diffi cult to specify, much less make explicit. But these ideas have a signifi cant infl uence on how teachers work with students on their writing, and, therefore, an important goal of this chapter is to engender an awareness of how language, thought, and writing interact and to help prospective teachers understand linguistic diversity so that they can work with their students more eff ectively. Some of this material addresses the sources of the friction that can occur when diversity and institutional expectations meet. But awareness of these sources (and of the friction) and knowledge about linguistic diversity and its relationship to writing can contribute to writing teachers’ success in responding to their students, enabling students to develop control over the form and substance of their writings.
