This qualitative study investigates how writing instructors compose feedback in multimodal digital environments, focusing on the rhetorical and relational dimensions of their design choices. Drawing on social semiotics and multimodal composition theory, the study analyzes feedback artifacts, instructor interviews, and student surveys from six first-year writing courses. Findings reveal that instructors engage in complex feedback design work across communication modes, often without formal training or shared frameworks. Instructors tended to default to text-based habits shaped by genre memory but adapted their strategies in response to communicative breakdowns and student needs. The study identifies three core themes: reliance on print-era conventions, rhetorical problem-solving through modal layering, and ambiguity in feedback interpretation. Despite these challenges, instructors demonstrated creativity and care in their attempts to communicate clearly and relationally. The article calls for a rhetorical framework to support multimodal feedback design, emphasizing the need for pedagogical reflection, professional development, and student co-interpretation. As genAI and platform automation continue to evolve, the findings underscore the importance of feedback as a site of human judgment and presence. The article concludes with recommendations for instructors, writing programs, and institutions to better support feedback as intentional, relational work.

This Teaching Tip introduces the Feedback Menu, a flexible protocol designed to promote student agency and feedback literacy in writing instruction. By allowing students to select the focus and mode of feedback they receive, the Menu helps tailor response to individual learning needs and supports meaningful revision at any stage of the composition process. The protocol is adaptable for use in first-year composition, professional writing, multilingual, and upper-division courses, in both face-to-face and online formats. Concrete implementation steps, sample menu items, and considerations for different teaching contexts are provided.

Research in feedback literacy (Carless & Boud, 2018; Molloy, Boud, & Henderson, 2020; Yu & Liu, 2021; Zhang & Mao, 2023) explores student use of written feedback and barriers to feedback uptake; the role of faculty in designing contextually appropriate feedback has been termed teacher feedback literacy (Carless & Winstone, 2023). When feedback does not achieve desired results, faculty must evaluate their feedback practices; they may be unaware of underlying features that hinder feedback effectiveness. In this paper, a long-time instructor of first-year college composition (FYC) interrogates her own feedback practices using tools from the specialization dimension of Legitimation Code Theory (LCT, Maton 2014; Maton 2016a; Maton 2016b). A translation device (Maton & Chen, 2016) connecting feedback data to LCT concepts was constructed to code responses to 105 student drafts. Subsequent analysis reveals that knowledge codes, which legitimate student achievement through demonstration of specialized knowledge and skills, predominate in the feedback. Comments foregrounding the dispositions, intentions, and agency of the student writers occur much less frequently. From these results, the instructor identifies potential barriers to student feedback uptake, including code mismatches and code confusion, which may be mitigated through adjustments to written responses and classroom instruction.

Student self-analysis and reflective work can be useful components of the writing classroom. This article examines a student self-diagnostic tool, developed by the author, which can elicit closer attention paid to the student’s own writing, analysis, and research processes and to other desirable outcomes the teacher’s learning plan may be pursuing. This tool, the Genre Understanding Sheet or GUS, has been successfully deployed in a variety of writing courses such as introductory composition, business and professional writing, and technical communication. The article examines the GUS and its development and rationale, reviews the underlying science and theory-work which inform its design, offers advice for integrating it into the writing classroom and making productive use of student output, and concludes with a discussion of benefits and the optimal motivation for teachers who choose to deploy it in their own classes. An annotated sample GUS is included.

This exercise guides students in first- and second-year college writing classes through the process of developing their Zero Draft into a completed essay by asking them to respond to five reflective questions. This is a metacognitive project that asks students to expand the ideas in their zero draft to transition from their brainstorm to a finished essay. It is a scaffolded writing assignment that supports students to develop a robust portable writing process that they can transfer to future writing projects.

As labor-based grading contracts gain momentum in first year writing classrooms, new kinds of response to writing take center stage. We explore how session notes composed by embedded peer tutors and students become rich tools in a writing process and create a gateway to the writing center for first-year students. By reading session notes in conversation with students’ reflective writing, we put forward three key findings: students articulate a relationship between building confidence in their writing and their willingness to seek, receive, and value feedback; students discuss how the labor required for an ‘A’ pushed them to access and learn about resources outside of the classroom; and students’ interactions with the Writer’s Workshop during their first two semesters of college indicate that they can build long-term relationships with peers and with the Writer’s Workshop (including as staff members) beyond first-year-writing and beyond their first semester.

In writing studies research, automated writing evaluation technology is typically examined for a specific, often narrow purpose: to evaluate a particular writing improvement measure, to mine data for changes in writing performance, or to demonstrate the effectiveness of a single technology and accompanying validity arguments. This article adopts a broader perspective and offers a standpoint theory of action for formative automated writing evaluation (fAWE). Following presentation of the features of our standpoint theory of action, we describe our two study sites, and each instructor documents her experiences using the fAWE application (app), Writing Mentor® (WM). One instructor analyzes experiences using the app with nontraditional adult learners to provide career pathway access through a high school equivalency (HSE) credential awarded by successful completion of the GED® (General Educational Development Test) or of the HiSET® (High School Equivalency Test). A second instructor analyzes WM experiences working with a diverse population of two-year college students enrolled in first-year writing. These instructors’ experiences are used to propose two theory-of-action frameworks based on the instructors’ standpoints, with particular attention to fAWE components, pedagogies, and consequences. To explore the representativeness of these two case studies, we also analyze student feature use and self-reported self-efficacy data from a general sample (N = 5,595) collected through WM user engagement. We conclude by emphasizing the pedagogical potential of writing technologies, the advantages of instructionally situating these technologies, and the value of using standpoint theories of action as a way to anticipate local impact.

Writing instructors and writing tutors are often interested in discovering whether their responses to student writing facilitate student revision at a deep level. This teaching article illustrates how written metaphorical response can prompt student revision beyond surface features. It includes a description of tutor training in metaphorical response; tutors’ responses offered to first-year composition students’ first drafts of an assignment; students’ second-draft revisions; and remarks from interviews with tutors, students, and course instructors. In particular, I examine the specific metaphorical strategies used by tutors to convey revision advice. Generalizing from these findings, I show how tutors and teachers can use metaphor as a means of clarifying their intent, motivating students, and stimulating deep revision of students’ texts.

This article reports on a large-scale study of peer and instructor response and student reflection on response. The corpus of instructor and peer response to 864 drafts of student writing was collected via ePortfolios from first-year writing courses and courses across disciplines at 70 U.S. institutions of higher education. The following questions guided a qualitative analysis of the data: (a) What are the similarities and differences in the ways instructors and peers respond to college writing? (b) What perspectives do college students have on the feedback they receive on their writing from instructors and peers? Three themes emerged from a review of the literature on peer and instructor response and the results of the analysis of the data: (a) peer responders tend to be more focused on global concerns than instructors, (b) peer responders tend to be less directive than instructors, and (c) students learn as much from reading their peers’ drafts as they do from the comments they receive from peer responders or the instructor. The findings support an argument for placing peer response at the center of the response construct, rather than thinking of peer response as merely a complement to instructor response.

This article describes a qualitative inquiry into the peer review experience of second-language (L2) international students enrolled in a mainstream first-year writing (FYW) course at a private university in the eastern United States. Data collection involved semistructured interviews with 10 L2 students at three points during the semester they were enrolled in the FYW course. Three themes were identified through inductive data analysis: (a) perception of self, (b) perception of peers, and (c) perception of process. A discussion of the findings highlights the complex ways these themes overlap to deepen our understanding of peer review as a meaningful socioacademic activity in multilingual classroom settings.

Multimodality is recognized as a useful pedagogical tool, but it is often difficult to apply in real-life curricula. Further, expectations on educators and various campus units are increasingly complex and require nimble and innovative partnerships. In this article, Christina, a first-year composition instructor, and Lucie, the university’s writing center (WC) director, share their different but parallel paths to “going multimodal” for the first time. They show how they joined forces to determine how best to teach and respond to students’ diverse multimodal projects. First, Christina explains how she taught herself and her students about multimodal rhetoric and genres with the help of two dedicated WC tutors. She also outlines how she created a rubric to respond to students’ projects throughout their composing processes. Then Lucie shares her initial hesitancy about going multimodal and how she ultimately prepared her tutors to respond to the projects that Christina’s students presented. The article concludes with Christina and Lucie discussing the exciting synergy they experienced while working together and with the tutors and the challenges they faced. For composition instructors, tutors, and WC directors interested in adopting multimodal assignments, this article provides ideas and suggestions for teaching, giving feedback, and mentoring.

In spite of a host of scholarship pertaining to response and the contexts that surround our response practices, few have studied how everyday classroom texts may inform students’ interpretations of teachers’ written feedback on their writing. This article examines the results from case studies of six students across two firstyear composition (FYC) classrooms and explores how these students drew upon three types of contextual factors—assignment descriptions/texts, student-teacher conferences, and grading materials—in order to articulate their interpretations of their teachers’ written feedback. This article investigates the roles each of these contextual factors play in students’ interpretations of their teachers’ written commentary. It also discusses how classroom texts work reciprocally with one another and in conjunction with teachers’ overall pedagogical practices. The article further argues for greater attention to these classroom texts in response scholarship and practice, along with recommending an approach to response that views these contextual factors and written feedback in a more pedagogically integrated fashion. The article concludes by advocating for the development of cohesive narratives about writing across the texts teachers create in their classrooms and the written commentary they provide to students.

As recent studies have shown (Ferris, 2014; Reid, Estrem, & Belcheir, 2012), formalized types of pedagogical instruction may be less effective for new instructors than previously thought. As new instructors form beliefs about responding to student writing through their first years of teaching and training, they may continue to rely heavily on knowledge from various communities of practice (Wenger, 2000) outside of their current programs while shaping their beliefs about feedback. This study examines these informal influences on the feedback beliefs of first-year writing instructors. Specifically, this study uses both surveys and interviews with teachers in their first 2 years of teaching at a university in the United States to uncover influences on these individuals that result from informal training. The purpose of this study is to examine how personal experiences, values, or beliefs based on their own lives might affect the beliefs with which instructors respond to their students’ writing in the classroom. Findings suggest that informal training is a valuable tool to new teachers for motivating them to respond to student writing and should be taken into account in teacher training.

Despite extensive attention to peer review in composition studies literature, the activity remains challenging to design, in part because there are multiple potential goals for peer review. This article draws on existing literature to describe a variety of peer review goals and then presents interview data to illustrate the perceptions of first-year composition instructors (n=3) and students (n=8) about the goals of peer review. The three instructor interviewees each described a specific and distinct goal for peer review: constructing quality feedback, identifying effective writing, and developing peer trust. However, when asked about the purpose of peer review, all eight of the students focused on one goal: improving draft quality. This article recommends increased attention to naming and differentiating among specific goals of peer review, as well as more discussion of ways to deliberately articulate those goals to students.

This study explores the perceptions of first-year composition (FYC) students toward written teacher feedback and compares the preferences of L1 English and international ESL writers. We used an online questionnaire to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. The first part of the questionnaire consists of 43 Likert items regarding teacher feedback in the context of a selected argumentative essay, and the second part consists of two open-ended questions regarding students’ opinions on teacher feedback. A total of 345 FYC students participated in the study. Our results show that both L1 and ESL writers prefer feedback that offers directions for improvement rather than general comments regarding errors in the writing, that both groups have an aversion to comments that offer no suggestions, that ESL writers are more enthusiastic about sentence-level feedback than L1 writers, and that terms like “constructive criticism” are largely absent from the lexicon of ESL writers. More broadly, L1 writers are more oriented toward how instructors provide feedback while the ESL writers are more oriented toward the text itself. Ultimately, these findings are meant to help FYC instructors work in classrooms that contain both L1 and ESL writers.

Given that feedback from different sources is combined to ripple through the entire revision process, it is important to create a space where students can understand and interact with different modes of feedback in order to work through it. However, pedagogy for the use of multiple feedback sources from a practitioner’s perspective has been rare. To address this paucity of attention, this teaching article suggests a feedback-rich framework to help students grow as independent writers who can navigate the various interactional spaces for their writing and presents a narrative example of a feedback-rich environment for an ESL first-year composition class. Teacher observations of student performance indicate that the emphasis on multiple forms of feedback and reflection helped the students become more analytical about their revisions, more active in writing conferences, more willing to solicit feedback, and thus more engaged with revision.

This in-house inquiry explores the response practices of a group of L2 writing teachers in our specific program to gain a better understanding of these teachers’ feedback practices and to bring about purposeful change within our local context. Data consist of 4,313 electronic feedback (e-feedback) items given by six writing teachers to 36 L2 students on six writing tasks in a first-year writing course for international students. Using Ene and Upton’s (2014) e-feedback framework, each feedback instance was coded for feedback target, directness, explicitness, charge, and location. Although some variations exist, results show that these teachers overwhelmingly focused on form across writing tasks. Findings also show that the e-feedback was primarily corrective, direct, explicit, and within-text. Following a discussion of our programmatic response to this internal investigation, we conclude by arguing that programs can establish philosophies of response grounded in their specific context based on examination of local practices.

While some studies suggest that teachers’ written comments help students transfer writing skills across contexts (Wardle, 2007), the literature on feedback’s role in the transfer process has yet to be fully explored. Research has indicated that feedback that is intentional, specific, and reflective benefits students’ writing growth and the transfer process. To rethink this process of providing feedback, this article discusses how writing center principles can be applied to commenting for transfer in first-year composition and writing-intensive courses. Writing centers offer an individualized, student-centered, conversational approach to learning. Universities have incorporated the writing center into the classroom through writing fellows programs. This article will cover how instructors can more effectively foster transfer, implementing the writing center through goal setting and dialogism in their feedback. One narrative in a writing-intensive research methods course illustrates the benefits of this pedagogy.

Online peer review has been increasingly implemented in composition and second language classes. This article reports on a pedagogical practice in which students used the Turnitin PeerMark tool to conduct peer response in a first-year writing class. In this study, students drew on multiple PeerMark functions (i.e., commenting tools, composition marks, and PeerMark questions) and provided feedback on their peers’ summary and response papers. In addition to students’ positive attitude toward the use of PeerMark revealed in the interviews, analyses of archived PeerMark records suggest that students provided constructive feedback in multiple aspects and that the majority of peer comments were later incorporated into students’ revisions through different ways. This report expects to encourage teachers to implement peer review using Turnitin in their classrooms and further explore the role of technologies for peer feedback.

Welcome to the second issue of our third year of publication. As the journal has become more established, we are seeing a wide range of fascinating research and teaching work related to response to writing in both first and second language contexts. This issue is no different. In this issue, we present two research articles, two teaching articles, and a book review. In the first piece, “L2 Learners’ Engagement with Direct Written Corrective Feedback in First-Year Composition Courses,” Izabela Uscinski examines how second language learners of English engage with feedback from their college writing teachers. Uscinski draws on Svalberg’s (2009) definition of engagement, suggesting that it “encompasses not only the cognitive realm, but also affective and social.” To better understand how writers make use of written corrective feedback and whether it leads to meta-awareness and noticing of language structures, she recruited eight Chinese-L1 first-year college students taking a stretch composition course at a university in the United States. She asked the students to meet with her when they had received grammar feedback from their teachers and recorded the computer screen as they revised their essays. Playing back the recordings, she then asked the students to discuss what they had done and why.

This study explores student written responses to teacher feedback and analyzes these responses through the framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA). Drawing on CDA, we examined the structural, interactional, and interdiscursive features of 21 students’ paragraph-length comments on formative teacher feedback on their first assignment draft in a first-year composition class and investigated relations between the text, interaction, and context. The structural analysis indicates that the students’ comments demonstrate their emerging academic literacy skills. Our interactional analysis shows that most students took on an active role as a good student and a hardworking writer, but some students exerted their agency by taking the opportunity to resist the authority of the teacher, while others rejected it altogether. Our interdiscursive analysis illustrates that students used not only language from the teacher’s comments, but also metalanguage of the composition classroom to formulate their responses. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for teaching practices and future avenues for research on students’ responses to teacher feedback.

This study explores students’ response to direct written corrective feedback (WCF) in first-year composition courses. To that end, it focuses on analyzing students’ engagement with direct feedback and meta-awareness of the corrections provided on one of their drafts. Data include students’ revisions recorded with screen-capture software and the video-stimulated recall, which was transcribed and coded for evidence of engagement and meta-awareness. The findings of the study indicate that students’ engagement and meta-awareness may be affected by pedagogical factors, such as feedback delivery method. Based on the insights gained from this study, the author suggests that direct feedback may be more beneficial if it is provided in a comment or in the margin of the paper, and that the student may have a higher potential for learning if a brief explanation about the nature of the error is included. In addition, students may need to be provided with guidelines on how to engage with their instructors’ feedback. The author concludes by suggesting that if direct WCF is provided, students should be held accountable for learning from the feedback, and the author recommends ways in which this can be done without penalizing students for not showing immediate improvements on subsequent writing projects.

This article introduces the idea of grammar agreements as a way to offer a more “finely tuned approach” to grammar feedback in the L2 classroom (Ferris, Liu, Sinha, & Senna, p. 307). These agreements offer students options for how the teacher will respond to writing done in their first-year composition classes. The authors offer suggestions for both why grammar agreements are a useful tool in the L2 writing classroom (and possibly beyond) and how to implement grammar agreements effectively.

Metacognition is a typical learning outcome in composition courses, but providing feedback on low-stakes reflective writing and assessing highstakes reflective writing are complex tasks that warrant more attention in the literature. Consequently, this article explores how the assignment of and response to low-stakes reflective writing can provide effective scaffolding to higher-stakes reflective writing tasks. We present an example of our strategy for response through one instructor’s experience with responding to her first-year composition student’s low-stakes reflective writing. Ultimately, we call for more research on responding to reflective writing that will ensure the valid and reliable assessment of metacognition in composition courses.

In addition to other unfortunate circumstances, teacher response that comes in the form of negative, generic, and unintelligible commentary causes students to become alienated from writing. This problematic response often results from the lack of supportive student-centered response pedagogies within the first-year composition classroom. In an attempt to prevent additional writerly estrangement and to undo students’ isolation from the writing process, this article explores Marshall Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication theory as a potential framework for a dialogic, compassionate writing response pedagogy.

This study presents a piloted second language (L2) writing tutor (L2WT) internship program as a way to provide supplemental, sustained writing fellow- style support to L2 writers and classroom teachers in multilingual firstyear composition (FYC) courses in a large U.S. university within the span of one semester. The major facet of the internship program was the tutors’ response to student writing in a one-to-one context for each major essay assignment. The presence and needs of second language writing students in the writing classroom have been clearly articulated in relevant research, but what is less known is how to devise successful methods of support that are both helpful and economical. The author provides evidence that students in L2WT-mediated classes earned higher grades and that the L2WT internship program was perceived as valuable for all parties involved: L2 writers, L2 writing teachers, and the tutors themselves. Additionally, the for-credit internship is a cost-effective option for writing programs without the funding to implement a large-scale writing fellows program. Implications for future offerings of the fellow-style internship, as well as suggestions for how to implement this program in additional contexts, are provided.

Faculty and writing center tutors bring expertise to writing as practice and process. Yet at many institutions, the two groups work in relative isolation, missing opportunities to learn from each other. In this article, I describe a faculty development initiative in a multidisciplinary writing program that brings together new faculty and experienced undergraduate tutors to workshop instructors’ comments on first-year writing. The purpose of these workshops is to assist faculty in crafting inquiry-driven written responses that pave the way for collaborative faculty-student conferences. By bringing together scholarly conversations on tutor expertise and the role of faculty comments in student learning, I argue for the value of extending partnerships between writing centers and programs. Such accounts are important to the field for challenging what Grutsch McKinney (2013) calls the “writing center grand narrative,” which limits the scope of writing center work by imagining centers primarily as “comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing” to the exclusion of lived realities (p. 3). In this case, I describe a writing center where tutors bring their expertise outside the center and into the faculty office, consulting in small groups with faculty with the aim of enriching the quality of instructor feedback in first-year seminars.

Research has shown that in order to facilitate the development of students’ writing, teachers need to cultivate principles of effective feedback. However, revision is a joint process, and for the maximum effectiveness of this process, there should be more than just a giver-receiver relationship with the teacher giving the information and the student receiving it. Instead, students should be actively involved in the revision process by reflecting on and analyzing their own writing and meaningfully responding to teacher feedback. This teaching article describes a technique—Letter to the Reviewer—that facilitates collaboration between the teacher and the student. A Letter to the Reviewer is a memo that students attach to each draft, in which they provide a short reflective note to their reviewer by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of their draft and ask for specific feedback on certain elements of the draft. The technique was implemented in two first-year composition classes for multilingual writers in a large university in the Midwest. Teacher observations of student work and students’ self-reports on this technique demonstrated that the letters helped students approach their own writing more analytically, ask the teacher and peers for focused feedback, engage in the collaborative revision process, provide more specific feedback on their classmates’ writing, prepare for writing conferences, and recognize the connection between classroom instruction and their own writing.