"What new things these words can do for you": A focus on one writing-project teacher and writing instruction

This study explores a writing-project teachers premises about writing and i llustrates how those underlying principles drove her instruction, influence d children work, and created a particular theory of writing in her classroo m culture. The sociolinguistic and discourse analysis of the transcripts fr om one 10-minute writing conference revealed 7 assumptions about writing: ( a) writers need time to write; (b) writers need to be in charge of their ow n writing, (c) writers find ideas to, write about when they read; (d) writi ng is social and students learn to become writers and authors by interactin g with their peers, their parents, and their teachers, (e) writing includes learning how to spell and proofread work, (f) "writers" write many things but "authors" write books; and (g) Writers speak to audiences that they may never meet. The study found that writing conferences are important instruc tional conversations for the teaching of writing (Graves, 1983), that learn ing to write also involves the influence of the social lives of children (D yson, 1993), and that writing teachers benefit from being writers themselve s (Blau, 1988).