In this essay I argue for a Restorative English Education—that is, a pedagogy of possibilities that employs literature and writing to seek justice and restore (and, in some cases, create) peace that reaches beyond the classroom walls. A Restorative English Education requires English language arts teachers to resist zero-tolerance policies that sort, label, and eventually isolate particular youth, embracing a discourse of restoration in which all young people have an opportunity to experience “radical healing” through engaging in deliberate literate acts that illuminate pathways of resilience.

In recent years, scholars have voiced the need for research which focuses on the ability of multilinguals to write across multiple languages rather than on the limitations that they face when composing in a non-native language. In order to better understand multilingual writers as resourceful and creative problem-solvers, the current study aims to investigate how German/Spanish/Catalan multilinguals draw on the full extent of their linguistic repertoires to solve lexical problems while writing in their fourth language, English. Think-aloud data were collected from 10 informants (8 female, 2 male; ages 16-17) in a German immersion secondary school in Barcelona, Spain. Analysis of the participants’ protocols revealed that the activation of lexical items across several languages was a common approach to tackling lexical problems. The writers’ resourcefulness and creativity were apparent in the activation of cognate forms and their willingness to experiment with language. In their metacomments, they expressed awareness of their strategic behavior as well as their degree of satisfaction with their solutions. It is argued that more research into the strategic behavior of multilingual writers is necessary in order to inform multilingual pedagogy.

The debate surrounding how best to support African American student writers continues today as the gap between achievement scores persists. This qualitative analysis documents the classroom structures and instructional practices of two English Language Arts teachers working in a predominately African American public middle school, whose students demonstrated growth on the state’s standardized assessment of English Language Arts. Teachers were chosen based on value-added measures of student achievement using test score gain and observational data of their writing instruction. Both teachers explicitly and repeatedly targeted writing skills and strategies during instruction and offered aligned instructional supports. Tasks assigned were intellectually challenging and aligned with the targeted skills and strategies. The data suggest ways to balance both skill and strategy instruction and a process approach to writing instruction, which many argue is supportive of African American students’ writing development.

The concept of voice has long attracted the attention of teachers, but more recently has also been the focus of a growing body of research aiming to understand voice as self-representation in writing. Adopting a socio-cultural orientation to voice, studies have revealed much about how textual choices are used by readers to build images of text-authors; however, such research has been limited to contexts in which the author’s actual identity is unknown by the reader. Research has offered limited insight into how an author’s embodied self figures into readers’ voice construction, or how voice construction is connected to readers’ assessments of text—with or without knowledge of the author’s identity apart from the text. This article takes up these issues by exploring how readers’ exposure to videos of two second language (L2) student-authors influenced voice construction and evaluation of the students’ papers. Through primarily qualitative and intertextual analysis, the study concludes that voice construction, extra-textual identity, and assessment are related and interacting constructs, though these relationships are neither straightforward nor predictable. Methodological, pedagogical, and theoretical implications of this conclusion are discussed

In order to prepare effective writing teachers, teacher educators need an understanding of how preservice preparation programs, inservice professional development, and the policies and practices of K-12 schools work together to influence teachers’ writing instruction. This qualitative case study uses complexity theory (Davis & Sumara, 2006) to analyze how one teacher learned to teach writing within and through the emergent, nested, interacting systems of teacher education and the school where she took her first teaching job. Data sources were fieldnotes of her teaching and interviews about her instructional decisions, which were coded using constant comparison (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and the theoretical lens. Findings indicate the teacher’s understanding of writing instruction emerged through interactions between systems as she reproduced and recombined the ideas, values, goals, and activities she encountered within her undergraduate and graduate courses, her school district, and her sixth-grade classroom. The study concludes with discussions of the dynamics of learning to teach writing that emerged through the research and the implications of these dynamics for teacher education, educational policy, and future research.

The purpose of the present study is to examine concurrent and predictive evidence used in the validation of ACCUPLACER, a purchased test used to place first-year students into writing courses at an urban, public research university devoted to science and technology education. Concurrent evidence was determined by correlations between ACCUPLACER scores and scores on two other tests designed to measure writing ability: the New Jersey Basic Skills Placement Test and the SAT Writing Section. Predictive evidence was determined by coefficients of determination between ACCUPLACER scores and end-of-semester performance measures. A longitudinal study was also conducted to investigate the grade history of students placed into first-year writing by established and new methods. When analyzed in terms of gender and ethnicity impact, ACCUPLACER failed to achieve statistically significant prediction rates for student performance. The study reveals some limits of placement testing and the problems related to it.

Composition theorists concerned with students’ academic writing ability have long questioned the application of voice as a standard for writing competence, and second language compositionists have suggested that English language learners may be disadvantaged by the practice of emphasizing voice in the evaluation of student writing. Despite these criticisms, however, voice continues to frequently appear as a goal in guidelines for teaching writing and on high-stakes writing assessment rubrics in the United States. Given the apparent lack of alignment between theory and practice regarding its use, more empirical research is needed to understand how teachers apply voice as a criterion in the evaluation of student writing. Researchers have used sociocultural and functionalist frameworks to analyze voice-related discursive patterns, yet we do not know how readers evaluate written texts for voice. To address this gap in research the present study asked: 1) What language features do secondary English teachers associate with voice in secondary students’ writing and how do they explain their associations? 2) How do such identified features vary across genres as well as among readers? Nineteen teachers were interviewed using a think-aloud protocol designed to illuminate their perceptions of voice in narrative and expository samples of secondary students’ writing. Results from an inductive analysis of interview transcripts suggest that participating teachers associated voice with appraisal features, such as amplified expressions of affect and judgment, that are characteristic of literary genres.

Despite a long debate and the accompanying call for changes in the past few decades, grammarinstruction in college English classes, according to some scholars, has remained largely “disempowering,” “decontextualized,” and “remedial” (Micciche, 2004, p. 718). To search for more effectiveand empowering grammar teaching, this study explores the use of corpora for problem-basedlearning/teaching of lexicogrammar in a college English grammar course. This pedagogy wasmotivated by research findings that (1) corpora are a very useful source and tool for languageresearch and for active discovery learning of second/foreign languages, and (2) problem-basedlearning (PBL) is an effective and motivating instructional approach. The data collected andanalyzed include students’ individual and group corpus research projects, reflection papers oncorpus use, and responses to a post-study survey consisting of both open-ended and Likert questions.The analysis of the data found the following four themes in students’ use of, and reflectionsabout, corpus study: (1) critical understanding about lexicogrammatical and broader languageuse issues, (2) awareness of the dynamic nature of language, (3) appreciation for the context/register-appropriate use of lexicogrammar, and (4) grasping of the nuances of lexicogrammaticalusages. The paper also discusses the challenges involved in incorporating corpus use into Englishclasses and offers suggestions for further research.

The 2010 Alan C. Purves Award Committee is pleased to announce this year’s award recipient, Elizabeth Dutro. Her article, “What ‘Hard Times’ Means: Mandated Curricula, Class-Privileged Assumptions, and the Lives of Poor Children” (RTE Vol. 44, No. 3, February 2010), is an exemplary source of thorough research and much-needed pedagogical strategy encouraging the creation of curricula grounded in students’ lived realities.

In what ways can teachers incorporate young people’s home and community literacy practices into classrooms when such practices vastly differ from the teachers’ literacy experiences? How can teacher education curriculum and teaching influence teachers’ pedagogical practices? How can children’s roles be pedagogically reframed and become meaningful strengths in classrooms? Grounded in these interrelated research questions, this article documents some of the influences of Freirean culture circle as an approach to inservice teacher education on the ways in which two Head Start teachers and a teacher educator negotiated and navigated within and across home and school literacy practices, co-creating a curriculum based on generative themes and making early education meaningful to children from multiple backgrounds. Further, it proposes that conducting extensive ethnographic studies is not a prerequisite to creating pedagogical spaces that honor children’s home literacy practices and cultural legacies. Findings indicate that as teachers seek to build on young children’s language and literacy strengths, it is pedagogically beneficial to engage in documenting glimpses of home literacy practices within and across contexts while simultaneously challenging and (re)positioning ethnocentric definitions of literacy by engaging young children as authentic curriculum designers.

This article reports findings from a qualitative study of Spanish-English code-switching “or Spanglish” among bilingual Latina/Latino sixth graders at a middle school in East Los Angeles. Analysis of the data revealed significant parallels between the skills embedded in students’ everyday use of Spanglish and the skills that they were expected to master according to California’s sixth-grade English language arts standards. In particular, students displayed an impressive adeptnessat (1) shifting voices for different audiences, and (2) communicating subtle shades of meaning. It is argued that this skillful use of Spanglish could potentially be leveraged as a resource for helping students to further cultivate related academic literacy skills. The article concludes with a discussion of specific implications for how teachers might begin to leverage Spanglish as a pedagogical resource by helping students to recognize, draw on, and extend the skills already embedded intheir everyday use of language.

The objective of this paper is to use psychoanalytic theory to examine how attempts at critical teaching in two English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms related to changes in student subjectivity. The research critiques critical pedagogical assumptions regarding transformation and empowerment through a Lacanian perspective. More specifically, the persistent problem in critical pedagogy research “that it does not explore the effect of critical practices on student actions and beliefs” is examined. Based on a two-year study in ESL classrooms in the Southwestern U.S., this report uses case studies to outline types of changed comportments, or microtransformations, that students exhibited. Microtransformations are defined as instances in which small events triggershifts in student practice and consciousness in ways that counter critical pedagogical narratives but are consistent with Lacanian theoretical perspectives.

Drawing from a study of one student’s literate engagements with English studies and fan fiction and related fan art over her two years in an MA program, which also reached back to the earlier writing she did for English classes and other writings before the study began, this article employs sociohistoric theory to examine the profoundly dialogic interplay of vernacular and disciplinary literate activities. Following a detailed look at the student’s extensive involvement with fan fiction, the article elaborates the trajectory of linkages between fan fiction and English studies, paying particular attention to the repurposing of literate practices across these activities, the synergies and tensions that texture such interactions, and the long-term implications they have for the production of literate practice and person. Ultimately, the article argues for increased theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical attention to the heterogeneous assemblage of literate practices and identities that may be mediating literate action and, in particular, to the role vernacular literacies can play in developing disciplinary engagement and vice versa.

The ethics and efficacy of explicitly teaching disciplinary discourse conventions to undergraduate students has been hotly debated. This quasi-experimental study seeks to contribute to these debates by focusing on the conventional special topoi of literary analysis”conventions that previous Writing in the Disciplines (WID) research indicates are customarily tacitly imparted to literature students. We compare student writing and questionnaires from seven sections of Writing about Literature providing explicit instruction in these disciplinary conventions to those from nine sections taught using traditional methods. We examine whether explicit instruction in disciplinary conventions helps students produce rhetorically effective discourse, whether English professors prefer student discourse that uses these conventions, and whether explicit instruction in disciplinary conventions hampers student expression, enjoyment, and engagement. Five English professors who rated the student essays gave higher ratings to essays that engaged the special topoi of their discipline. Furthermore, they significantly preferred the essays written by students who had received explicit instruction in these topoi. Meanwhile, students who received explicit instruction in the special topoi of literary analysis indicated comparable, often higher levels, of engagement, enjoyment, and perceived opportunities for self-expression to those students who experienced the course’s traditional pedagogy. These findings suggest several implications for WID instruction and research relating to student and faculty professionalization in higher education.

This four-year longitudinal study examines the transitions of an early-career teacher from her completion of a graduate program with English certification (grades 7-12) into teaching literature in an urban high school. Our central question was how Beth’s pedagogical knowledge was shaped over time by her consistent efforts to enact two key principles: (1) the centrality of students’ meaning making and (2) the need to maintain high academic expectation for all students. The tensions that resulted from her department’s stances toward these principles led to consequential transitions (Beach, 1999, 2003) for Beth’s learning and development. An activity-theoretical analysis showed that over time Beth’s development was shaped by the values, experiences, and practices of other teachers in her immediate professional communities and in contexts external to the department. Rather than relying on a single activity setting, Beth’s pedagogical knowledge and practices developed out of an interweaving of conceptual and practical tools based on the constructivist principles of her teacher education program, her deepening knowledge of English studies, her students’ learning, her enactment of new teaching practices, and her involvement in this longitudinal research project. This study raises questions regarding stage theories of teacher learning and development, suggests a horizontal notion of teacher development grounded in sociocultural theory, and provides evidence for the positive and lasting effects of teacher education and reflective practice.

Trickster tales, with their teachings on how to behave in the world, are a powerful means for transmitting social knowledge and cultural mores to children. In this study we compared two approaches to teaching fourth-grade students to write trickster tales. Although both instructional methods incorporated aspects of the writing process approach, only the developmentally based method took into account students’ expected developmental growth patterns in narrative composition.

This article explores a third-grade teacher’s use of critical writing pedagogy to encourage students’ exploration of issues that were important in their lives from personal as well as social perspectives.

These two recipients of this year’s Alan C. Purves Award reflect on their work (reported in RTE Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 269–303) on “A Cognitive Strategies Approach to Reading and Writing Instruction for English Language Learners in Secondary School” and the lessons they learned from their original research study as they tried to replicate the project in two additional districts outside their service area, to determine if the implications of their study would hold beyond the local context. The Alan C. Purves Award is given to the RTE article in the previous volume year judged most likely to impact educational practice

This study offers an alternative to traditional notions of scaffolding for reading comprehension by tracing the evolution of a fifth-grade small group literature conversation in which the teacher sought to displace himself as “primary knower” (Berry, 1981) in the conversation. The study examines how the teacher shared evaluation with his students even when they sought to reposition him as primary knower.

Despite the general trend to embrace interdisciplinarity in post-secondary education, we remain remarkably unclear concerning what we mean by interdisciplinarity and how it is achieved. Reporting on research conducted in a team-taught interdisciplinary course, I propose a new way of conceptualizing interdisciplinary connections, grounded in Bakhtinian theories of language and cognition. I offer a three-part schema for identifying the discursive disciplinary resources individuals use to make interdisciplinary connections and identify some broad characteristics of writing assignments that appear to invite students to make connections among disciplines. Finally, I argue that reflection on certain types of interdisciplinary connections can be an extremely powerful resource for interdisciplinary as well as disciplinary thinking and learning.

This study was conducted by members of a site of the California Writing Project in partnership with a large, urban, low-SES school district where 93% of the students speak English as a second language and 69% are designated Limited English Proficient.

While peer review is a common practice in college composition courses, there is little consistency in approach and effectiveness within the field, owing in part to the dearth of empirical research that investigates peer-review processes. This study is designed to shed light on what a peer reviewer actually reads and attends to while providing peer-review feedback.

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In this article, we present secondary students’ perceptions of their writing and writing instruction. Using the NCTE/IRA Standards as the foundation for a survey, we questioned nearly 2,000 public-school students concerning what they wrote, how they wrote, and the extent to which they wrote in their language arts classes.

Drawing on data gathered during a fourteen-month study of reading practices among poor and working-class girls, this essay explores the challenges of creating a responsive and critical reading pedagogy across boundaries of class. Set largely in a summer and after-school reading program for pre-teen girls, the study addressed the question of how a pedagogy centered around literature might accord the possibility for girls to read, speak, and value in more than one class-specific voice. The complexities of creating such a critical reading project are explored through narratives that chronicle the interplay of the material, the psychological, and the discursive in girls’ textual preferences and literary responses. Assuming the dual voice of teacher and ethnographer, the author argues for a new poetics of inquiry that can convey the nuanced complexities of reading, voice, and psychological experience among girls growing up in working-poor America.

The question of whether written genres can be learned through explicit teaching or can only be acquired implicitly through writing in authentic contexts remains unanswered. The question is complicated by the different parameters associated with teaching genre to first- or second-language learners, to children or adults, in settings in which the genre is authentically used or in settings (such as writing classes) in which genre learning is decontextualized. Quantitative studies of teaching genre offer mixed results, but in particular, there are no control-group studies of first-language adults. In this paper, we report research on teaching the genre of the laboratory report to first-language university students in biology labs. In this posttest-only control-group study, the treatment was the use of LabWrite, online instructional materials for teaching the lab report. We hypothesized that the treatment group would be more effective in: (1) learning the scientific concept of the lab, and (2) learning to apply scientific reasoning. Results of holistic scoring of lab reports for hypothesis 1 and primary-trait scoring for hypothesis 2 showed that the lab reports of the LabWrite students were rated as significantly higher than those of the control group. A third hypothesis, that students using LabWrite would develop a significantly more positive attitude toward writing lab reports, was also supported. These findings suggest that first-language adults can learn genre through explicit teaching in a context of authentic use of the genre.

Researchers of literacies in out-of-school settings often argue that their studies hold significant implications for teaching practices. This argument seems to be partially supported by studies that have won the Alan C. Purves Award between 1998 and 2001, acknowledging RTE articles most likely to impact educational practice. Yet this line of inquiry obviously does not lessen the continuing need for rigorous classroom-based research. As I contemplate future directions for such work, a set of interrelated questions come to mind: To what extent should researchers be better prepared to engage in aspects of the specific teaching practices they are researching or designing? In what ways would engagements of this nature influence or potentially improve research findings and pedagogical designs? To what extent should researchers be prepared to “walk the walk” of implementing teaching practices in conjunction with “talking the talk” of researching and reporting on them?

English departments are increasingly under pressure to offer writing courses online, but research that informs effective pedagogies—including effective ways to respond to students’ drafts—is still limited.

A year-long, 2-level case study was conducted to examine both the complex writing performances of three students in a 2nd-3rd grade class and the instructional strategies of their teacher, focusing on the interplay between the children’s strategy use and the teacher’s instruction.

This study explores ways in which adults discuss literature (Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street) in two different settings, a traditional English seminar and an English education course designed to function as a book club. The differences described suggest tensions between the theoretical orientations and pedagogical practices of university departments of English and English education.

The purpose of this research was to examine both what it means to teach writing and what it means to write in a first-year university course in the history of science. More specifically, I investigated what students learned about writing when the focus was mainly on subject matter and only secondarily on writing and rhetoric. A number of converging methods of research were used to address this issue: audiotaping classroom discourse and taking field notes, interviewing students and collecting retrospective protocols about their responses to a writing assignment, and analyzing students’ texts. The analyses indicated that classroom discourse focused primarily on framing concepts that brought into focus different and conflicting conceptions of the scientific method and the ways authorship in history is colored by writers’ subjectivity and perspective taking. Although students’ interpretations of the writing assignment were not very detailed, the texts they wrote revealed some understanding of how to use comparisons as a tool for analysis in writing history, the importance of attending to context in examining a given historical phenomenon, and the extent to which writing history is both interpretive and rhetorical. Yet neither the focal students nor the other students participating in this study responded uniformly to the assignment. The data raise the question of whether disciplinary courses in writing provide an authentic alternative to the space general writing skills courses currently occupy, particularly if such classes exist as sites where students are introduced to critical thinking and argumentative writing in college.

This semester-long qualitative study explores the effects of a high-stakes, direct writing test on 3 teachers and their students in 1 rural Maryland high school. Out of the 23 students in both classes, 14 students had been identified for special education services for physical or learning problems; all had either failed the test once or had not yet taken it. The researchers conducted interviews with teachers and students, observed their classrooms, and collected samples of student writing and other artifacts to address 3 questions: (a) How did the test influence teacher beliefs about writing instruction? (b) How did these teachers adapt their instruction to respond to the demands of the test? (c) How did students who had not passed the test respond to their writing instruction and how did preparation for the test affect their attitudes/beliefs about writing? Our findings suggest that an emphasis on test preparation diminished the likelihood of the teachers’ engaging in reflective practice that is sensitive to the needs of individual students, that the high-stakes assessment process discounted the validity of locally developed standards for assessing writing, and that the criteria for passing the test failed to take into consideration the rich variety of American culture and the complexity of literacy learning.

Critical Pedagogy; Identity (Psychological) Explores the potential of hybridity for supporting critical pedagogies that seek to transform the knowledge, texts, and identities of the school curriculum. Draws on microanalyses of oral and written texts constructed by a Latina student perceived to be struggling academically. Shows the student interweaving home, school, and peer language practices to serve a variety of social and personal agendas.

Investigates cross-cultural tensions in Western writing pedagogy as reflected in Turkish teachers’ oppositional and accommodative attitudes and how those attitudes played out in classroom interactions. Discusses teachers’ perceptions concerning the effects of Western rhetorical styles on Turkish students’ thinking and identity, assumptions regarding philosophical and instructional objectives of Western approaches, and their views on what counts as good writing.

Examines, using grounded theory methods, an interactive, televised writing course taught via Teletechnet, a distance-education program at Old Dominion University. Shows how technology affects a writing classroom and influences the construction of students as writers. Suggests that institutional contexts are reconfigured in televised instruction as virtual and material spaces that allow interesting tensions to emerge.

Investigates, in a longitudinal study, the spelling development of young deaf children in the context of an integrated process writing classroom. Identifies/categorizes the spelling strategies employed by deaf writers as print-based, speech-based, and sign-based. Provides insights into the nature of cognitive processes in the deaf child.

Presents a functional grammatical analysis of the writing that 128 seventh- and eighth-grade students produced in response to their science teacher’s directive to describe a picture. Identifies the register elements of the task and the grammatical difficulties it posed for students. Shows that teachers can help students use grammatical resources to expand and develop their writing skills.

Investigates how teaching and the teacher’s role in elementary and secondary school writing classes have been conceptualized by leading workshop advocates. Uses M. Bakhtin’s writing on F. Dostoevsky to develop a metaphor of the writing teacher as novelist. Argues that workshop visions of teaching and the teacher’s role mystify meaning-making and ignore the workings of power.

The inquiry posed two basic research questions: a) Could changes in student writing be tied to conferencing, and b) Could the status of the student (weaker or stronger student, native or non-native speaker) or the type of writing course (general freshman composition or specialized genre-specific course) be tied to any systematic differences in the conferencing process or its outcome? This study tracked the discourses generated by 4 teachers around a set of their teacher-student writing conferences. They collected copies of first drafts, tapes of their conferences, and copies of subsequent drafts from one stronger and one weaker student, for a total of 8 students and 32 texts. All students revised their papers in ways indicating that the conference had had an effect on their revision process. The findings indicate that what is ostensibly the “same” treatment does not generate the same response from all students. They also indicate that the divergent backgrounds students bring to instructional events have a structuring effect that cannot be dismissed solely as teacher bias and self-fulfilling prophecy

Chinese students experience many difficulties in developing communicative competence in English in their English as a Foreign Language (EFL) courses in China. This essay provides cultural information that may be useful for researchers and American EFL teachers of Chinese-born students, in Chinese or American universities. It first reviews the pedagogical approaches used by native Chinese-speaking teachers of English in an educational environment grounded in Confucian precepts for teaching, learning, and educational roles and responsibilities. It suggests that many of the limitations on Chinese students’ learning of English stem from a traditional teacher-centeredc lassroom and the use of rote-memorys trategies. After noting the obstacles faced by Chinese EFL teachers who have tried to implement communicative approaches, this essay offers guidelines for reconciling a communicative approach with traditional Chinese methods

This study examined the effects of three study conditions (review only, study questions, and analytic essay writing) on high school students writing and learning from text (concept application, immediate recall, delayed recall, and recall of manipulated content). An experienced social studies teacher and two levels (general and academic) of her eleventh grade U.S. history course participated in the research. Observational and case study techniques were employed to describe the teacher’s pedagogy, and then a volunteer group of students from each class read, reviewed or wrote about their reading, and were tested on learning from selected history passages. Analyses of the students’ writings indicated their varying approaches to studying and writing about the passages. Both forms of writing enabled both groups to perform better on all learning measures, with the academic students consistently outperforming the general students. Analytic writing was associated with higher scores on concept application, while study questions led to better general recall in the immediate and delayed conditions. When recall was further analyzed for the number of content units contained in the written responses to the two writing tasks, more content units appeared in the analytic writing in both the immediatea nd delayedc onditions. Although the general students’ performanceso n this posttest measure were not as strong as the academic students’ performances, they benefited more from analytic writing than from answering study questions about the history passages. Because both instructional context and academic ability seem to influence students’ performances on writing-to-learn tasks, the study suggests the need for research that will disentangle these influences to identify the effects of pedagogy and student ability on learning from writing.

This article reports on a study of the relationship between classroom context and the revisions of student writers. Specifically, the study examined the nature of the instructional context of the writing in one senior high school classroom and explored potential connections between particular features of the teacher’s approach to writing instruction and the frequency and types of revisions students in that class made to their essays. Drafts of students’ essays were coded for revisions, and results of the coding were examined with reference to specific features of the instructional method and related features of classroom context. Results of the study indicate that students in the present study, like students in some previous studies of revision, focused their revisions on surface and stylistic concerns. The study suggests that specific features of the classroom context, particularly the workshopstyle structure of the course, the interactions among students and the teacher regarding the students’ writing, and the nature of the teacher’s strategies for responding to and evaluating students’ writing, may have reinforced the teacher’s and students’ traditional views of writing quality and revision and may have thus contributed to the students’ focus on lower-level concerns in revision.

More and more college campuses are offering one or another form of “writing-intensive” classes across the curriculum. This study investigates what students perceive to be the effects of the writing-intensive requirement at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa where students are required to take five courses designated as writing-intensive. To identify the potential composite effects of taking three or more writing-intensive classes and to identify evidence of learning that may have resulted from these multiple experiences, we interviewed 82 randomly selected seniors. Using interview transcriptions, we developed a scheme for analysis of the data. These analyses revealed several areas of self-identified improvement associated with writing-intensive classes: writing skills, knowledge acquisition, and problem-solving abilities. Students also reported that they had become better writers through interaction with their professors during the writing process, although they also reported wanting to better understand the philosophy behind writingacross- the-curriculuma nd the purposes of specific assignments. These student-reported effects of writing-intensive classes support the notion that writing can play an important part in learning.

Yes, education is a national issue, but it is also a danger. When I look all these books about how to teach, I have the impression that children are being used as fodder for testing, that the aim is not to educate them, but to bring them up as if they were frogs or guinea pigs for psychologists. This is dreadful. Poor young people! What they have to go through because of these books! They are trained like performing animals. (Unamuno, 1993, p.42) There are two things I cannot stand: pedagogy and sociology. The former must be replaced by art and the latter by history. (Unamuno, 1993, p. 42)

This study investigated the relationships among self-confidence about writing, expected outcomes, writing apprehension, general self-confidence, and writing performance in 30 undergraduate preservice teachers over one semester. Results supported social cognitive theory and prior findings reporting a relationship between confidence in one’s writing abilities and subsequentw riting performance. A regression model consisting of the variables noted above and a pre-performance measure accounted for 68% of the variance in writing performance. Students’ beliefs about their own composition skills and the pre-performance measure were the only significant predictors. Writing apprehension was negatively correlated with writing self-confidence but was not predictive of writing performance. General self-confidence was correlated with writing self-confidence, expected outcomes, apprehension, and performance but was not predictive of writing performance in the regression model. Results and implications are discussed, especially as they relate to the need for context-specific assessments of confidence in one’s own capabilities and to pedagogical obligations.

The goal of this study was to expand our understanding of mentoring situated within electronic exchanges. Focusing on three graduate and five undergraduate mentors’ responses via telecommunications, we explored the strategies mentors used to make their reading and understanding of the texts explicit to their students, the responses mentors provided to demonstrate how students might revise, and mentors’ perceptions toward mentoring. Mentors responded to eight drafts from 24 ninth-grade students over an eight-week period, generating an average of 20 comments per student draft. Data collected included response grids of each mentor’s comments to students, interviews with mentors midway and at the end of the study, and journals kept by the mentors. Results showed that mentor pre-project expectations about responses they might make to students did not correspond to their actual responses, and that as the project progressed, mentor responses formed patterns corresponding to the draft of the students’ writing assignment. Additional differences were found based on mentors’ previous teaching experience, gender, and requests for feedback. Mentors expressed as their greatest difficulty not knowing which comments were perceived by students as most helpful

This study provideas framework for analyzing t e multiplea spects of reader perspective in a teacher’s approacth to writing instruction. This framework is based on an examination of one teacher’s written comments on her students’ paper as well as on observations of her classroom. Analysis showed that the teacher’s perspectivaes a reader, as reflected by her written commenotsn students’ papers, differed (a) across students, especially for the two students at either end of the ability rangea; and (b) a cross writing assignmentrs, evealing differences in their difficulty but in ways not predicted by the theory underlying the assignment sequence. Groundeind the social processes of writing and reading in the context of the classroom, the framework gives researchers and teacher as way to explore reader perspective in teacher response to student writing and its influence on writing and learning to write.

Modeling of exemplary samples of prose has been a commonly used method of teaching composition skills. But little research has been done on the effectiveness of using prose modeling in the composition classroom, and even instructors who use prose modeling in their instruction often question its value. This study examines the differences in response between expert and novice writers who were asked to write essays in an unfamiliar prose form after having been given different sets of instructions, some of which included a model of the unfamiliar prose form. The results of the study indicate that novice writers who are given a model of an unfamiliar prose form to imitate respond in a manner which is more introspective and evaluative and far more similar to the responses of expert writers than do novice writers who are not given a model.

This investigation sought to determine how the active meaning-making process of 10 sixth-grade students with above average reading and writing ability was reflected in their written responses to four books of realistic fiction. Students kept literature response journals to record their ongoing thoughts and reflections during the reading process. The nine-point categorization scheme that emerged from the content of students’ responses was used to analyze the journals of 4 of these students in order to determine individual response styles. Further analysis revealed the sequence of response for these 4 students during each quarter of their reading and writing. The study suggests how complex and unique response to literature is for even upper elementary and middle school students

Most studies dealing with feedback and revision focus on teachers and students in composition courses. However, there is insufficient evidence for assuming that these studies are applicable to writing situations in non-composition courses. To investigate the writing processes of non-composition students, this study describes patterns of feedback and revision in four writing across the curriculum (WAC) courses. The first and final drafts of 20 WAC students were analyzed by a team of readers to determine the following: 1) the apparent aims and criteria underlying the feedback they received on first drafts; 2) the extent to which the students utilized this feedback while revising; 3) the criteria most affected by the revisions; and 4) the extent of the revisions. Several patterns that emerged in this study resemble those found in research involving composition classrooms, although there are some differences as well. The study also highlights several issues for future research, including the source of a writer’s or reader’s criteria for effective writing and the comparative value of global and non-global revisions.