Professional knowledge production through involvement in research/writing activities is a valued dimension of the work of university-based teacher educators. However, little attention has been given to how teacher-education doctoral students (predominantly former schoolteachers) become education-research writers as part of their professional development as university-based teacher educators. In this article, I examine 11 former elementary and secondary teachers’ professional identity work as writers, scholars, and researchers during their teacher-education doctoral studies. All 11 specialized in language, literacy, and/or literature education. I focus my analysis on their (dis)identifications with the terms writer, scholar, and researcher in stream-of-consciousness quick-writes that they produced at regular intervals throughout their semesters of participation in five extracurricular peer writing groups that I facilitated. To contextualize these writings, I also draw on observations that I made during five years of ethnographic fieldwork for my longitudinal study. Through my analysis, I demonstrate that the 10 women respondents tended to recount a similar genre of (dis)identification narrative, one in which they disavowed their own authority as writers, scholars, and/or researchers, excluding available evidence to the contrary. I argue that the women’s teacher-education doctoral program, which maintained researcher/teacher, faculty/teacher, and faculty/student hierarchies, may have resonated in particular with these former schoolteachers’ previous experiences of sociocultural marginalization as women, and may thus have contributed to the emergence of their (dis)identification-narrative genre. To enhance the professional development of teacher-education doctoral students and faculty alike, I offer suggestions for how faculty might facilitate doctoral students’ writing groups while positioning/figuring themselves as group members’ colleagues.

Young adults represent the most avid users of social network sites, and they are also the most concerned with their online identity management, according the Pew Internet and American Life Project (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010; Madden, 2012). These practices represent important literate activity today, as individuals who are writing online learn to negotiate interfaces, user agreements, and personal data, as well as rhetorical situations. Examining the social, technological, and structural factors that influence digital literacy practices in online environments is crucial to understanding the impact of these sites on writing practices. Applying Brooke’s (2009) concept of an “ecology of practice” to writing in digital environments, this article examines the digital literacy practices of one undergraduate student through his self-presentation strategies. In considering the roles that social network sites play in individuals’ literacy and identity practices, writing researchers and educators can better understand the literacy practices that students engage in outside of the classroom and the experiences they bring to their academic writing.

Quantitative analyses using CLASS 3.0 software and qualitative discourse analyses were conducted of the instructional and institutional effects of tracking in high- and low-track American literature classes taught by the same teacher, a participant in a national study of the effects of dialogic classroom discourse patterns on student achievement. The quantitative analyses of class activities and discourse patterns revealed somewhat different amounts and kinds of dialogic discourse in the two classes, but could not account for much of the difference in achievement between the two groups. A more detailed qualitative analysis of teacher interviews and classroom discourse, using discourse analysis to look at both how the classroom discourse positioned students vis-à-vis course content, and how students in the two tracks were characterized by the teacher, showed how instruction was influenced by the teacher’s cultural models of students’ institutional identities. The teacher’s identification with the high-track students aided her in enacting a curriculum that was more academically challenging and more coherent, both intertextually and culturally. These analyses suggest that institutional and instructional effects of tracking are inextricably interwoven where the teacher’s conceptions of students’ needs and abilities constrain the level of instruction and the coherence of the curriculum.

The task of responding to five serious and thoughtful papers is not an easy one. Although there is some overlap among them, each paper makes its own distinctive points. What we have decided to do is to identify the major concerns expressed by each author and then to respond to those concerns as best we can. The level of specificity that is possible in the identification of concerns is virtually infinite. The concerns that we have identified we regard as either important in their own right or common across the five papers that were invited. Following each point is our response.

This study explores audience awareness of writers as they compose for contrasting audiences. Experienced writers—all of them writing instructors at large public universities―composed aloud for two audiences which differed along the dimension of authority: incoming freshmen and a faculty committee. Protocols were analyzed for patterns of writing activities among all writers and for individual writers. Among all writers, two clear patterns emerged. Writers analyzed the faculty audience less frequently than the freshman audience, but they evaluated their text and writing goals more frequently when addressing the faculty. For individual writers, strong “interpretive frameworks” emerged, unique ways in which writersi nterpreted audiences and writing tasks, foregrounding quite different elements of the rhetorical situation. At times, interpretive frameworks overrode differences between the two audiences presented in the writing tasks; that is, writers attributed the same characteristics to both audiences despite the difference in these audiences’ social status within the university structure.

Preview this article: Viewpoints: Dramatism and the Composing Process, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/20/3/researchintheteachingofenglish15609-1.gif

This study examined the effect of sentence-combining and kernel-identification practice on the syntactic component of sixth graders’ reading comprehension, as measured by a cloze instrument developed by the authors, and by two subtests from the norm-referenced Test of Reading Comprehension (TORC). The experimental group completed eight open sentence-combining exercises, seven kernel-identification exercises, and eight cloze exercises over a 10-week period (two or three exercises per week). The comparison group completed eight cloze exercises during the same period. When covaried by Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills Total Reading scores and by pretest scores on the cloze instrument, results on the immediate posttest administration of the cloze instrument were significantly (p ˂ .001) in favor of the experimental group; results on a 6-week delayed administration of the cloze instrument approached but did not reach significance in favor of the experimental group (p ˂ .07). There was no significant difference between experimental and comparison groups on the two TORC subtests. Since the readability of the cloze instrument was estimated at eighth grade level (due primarily to the use of longer and more complex T-units), it was inferred that sentence-combining and kernel-identification training enabled the experimental group to comprehend longer, syntactically more complex sentences and to exhibit a tendency toward retention of this ability over a 6-week period.

Although the search for a reliable, quantitative measure of the maturity of written composition antedates LaBrant's (1933) subordination index, it was not until Hunt's (1965) identification of the T-unit that quantitative measures of sentence and clause length factors could be demonstrated to be valid, reliable indices of maturity. Following Hunt's exploration of the T-unit, several researchers attempted to design measures embodying linguistic features beyond clause and sentence length factors which indicate the maturity of written composition. Such scales include Botel and Granowsky's (1972) formula for measuring complexity: A directional effort, Endicott's (1973) proposed scale for and Golub and Kidder's (1974) syntactic density score.

In 1968, Alan Purves and Victoria Rippere published their ground-breaking study, The Elements Writing about a Literary Work, in which they proposed a new system for content analysis response to literature. Beginning with published writings of numerous critics from the time Aristotle, continuing with a pool critical statements about one work provided by contemporary scholars and critics, and finally refining the system on the basis essays drawn from students in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and Belgium, Purves and Rippere shifted the focus analysis from the correctness or accuracy a stated response to its content or subject. The which they proposed for analyzing response ranged from such literary devices as allusion and irony to general statements thematic importance or identification 139 elements in all, combined into 24 subcategories and 5 categories (engagement-involvement, perception, interpretation, evaluation,, and miscellaneous). The elements, presented with careful instructions for their use, illustrative studies, and the necessary reliability data, filled a methodological void and helped both to stimulate and to focus a nascent interest in research in response