This eight-year longitudinal case study follows one high school English teacher from her practicum and student teaching through three subsequent job sites, with one year off due to prohibitive job stress. To study the developmental path of Caitlin, the teacher, we rely on the metaphor of the twisting path, which comes from Vygotsky’s attention to socially mediated concept development. This development is reliant on engagement with obstacles that promote growth and conceptual synthesis, with some obstacles becoming prohibitive and discouraging and with the path proceeding in a serpentine rather than straightforward way. Our principal data source is a series of biannual interviews conducted either in person or via video-conferencing platforms. We trace Caitlin’s developmental path by attending to her encounters with competing perspectives, policies, and practices informing the English curriculum, especially as they were enforced by different stakeholders. These obstacles were at times internal to her own thinking (e.g., the tension between relational, student-centered instruction and the belief that students need guidance to reach their potential), at times local in terms of English department and schoolwide tensions (especially, contentious battles over canonical versus relational and contemporary teaching), and at times from distant sources in the form of community pressures and externally created policies affecting instruction (in particular, imposed standardized teaching and assessment in conflict with instruction predicated on relationships and teacher judgment). These conflicts were virtually nonexistent in the fourth school she taught in, an alternative school where test scores were far less important than establishing supportive relationships with students through which they experienced care and cultivation. This eight-year longitudinal case study contributes to research that investigates how school contexts affect teachers’ persistence and attrition, with attention to which sorts of environments provided obstacles that benefitted Caitlin’s development, and which were prohibitive.

This interview was conducted on February 14, 2023, and is published in the original Spanish in volume 58, issue 1 of Research in the Teaching of English. It was translated into English by Benjamin de Buen. David Poveda is associate professor at the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, School of Psychology of the Autonomous University of Madrid. He has been using ethnographic and qualitative methodologies for over two decades to study a wide range of educational and socialization processes of contemporary childhood and youth.

Socio-cultural and practice-based approaches to literacy, associated with the (New) Literacy Studies, having emerged in the 1980s, nowadays are an established research field. Based on in-depth research, in many contexts and countries, the (New) Literacy Studies has much to offer to teachers and policymakers. And yet this impressive body of work has had little impact on policy. Taking as my example England, I ask what research has shaped policy in the past 30 years and why socio-cultural and practice-based studies have been ignored. Thus, I address the question of where the field has been and where it should go to from the point of view of its relationship with policy. My focus is on the initial teaching of literacy in primary (elementary) schools. I discuss three factors which I believe contribute to our struggles to influence policy: the policy environment itself and how it has changed; the wider economy of literacy research and what knowledge counts in the interface between research and policy; and, finally, the role of the media and public discourse in the relationship between research and policy. I end with questions about what we may have missed and where the field might want to go.

Set in one of the least privileged neighborhoods of the US Southeast, this research project took a discourse analysis approach to construct a day-in-the-life case study. It illustrates how, during an after school storybook cooking class, a 7-year-old, multilingual, Mexican American girl navigated local linguistic microaggressions and extended microaffirmations to her peers. At the same time, she contested and critiqued societal power imbalances associated with whiteness. This study widens the corpus of scholarship that has primarily examined children’s sociodramatic play and literacy development in preschool settings. It also broadens the body of research that has predominantly focused on students’ linguistic dexterity and metalinguistic awareness in middle and high school contexts.

An equitable education for linguistically minoritized and racialized-Othered youth fosters their biliteracy and critical consciousness about racial ideologies. Yet little is known about how or whether secondary-level dual-language bilingual-education programs and teachers seek to enhance students’ critical consciousness—especially as a means of grappling with racist ideologies. Drawing together literacy and race studies in education, I theorize a continuum of racial literacies, then employ it to examine dual-language curriculum and instruction practices. I use interview and classroom-observation data to reveal that a racially diverse dual-language program offered more racial-literacy practices on the hegemonic end of the continuum than the counterhegemonic end. Using teachers’ practices as an index of their program’s stance on racial literacy, I argue that the program provided a whitestream bilingual education: it offered biliteracy schooling through hegemonic racial-literacy practices that perpetuate white supremacy. The teachers’ successes and challenges speak to the need for structural attention to resources, training, and program-wide support for critical-racial-literacy practices. I conclude the article by joining calls for bilingual education to enhance youths’ critical-racial consciousness, adding racial to signal the need to be intentional in teaching about and countering racism, colonialism, and imperialism.

The policing of Black Language is inextricably tied to the policing of Black people and is entrenched in a long history of white Western European colonization. The legacies of white supremacy pervade schooling in its earliest years, yet Black teachers have consistently mounted a counterforce in battling white hegemony. In this article, I feature one such teacher, Raniya, who licensed Black Language in her preK classroom. Based on three months of classroom observations and interviews, this ethnographic case study explores the institutional architecture that affords white supremacist language assessments, particularly through an epistemology of language as an abstracted entity and through its process of curricularization. A raciolinguistic perspective illuminated how the white teachers at Raniya’s school insisted on broadly dehumanizing students of color through a schoolwide policy based on white monolingual standards. Drawing on notion of “vernacular insurrections,” I juxtapose white teachers’ raciolinguistic ideologies with Raniya’s practices. She claimed her classroom as a critical vernacular site through her approach of student language as a practice, and by subverting the normalcy of white hegemony within the schoolwide assessment process. This article calls for a shift in thinking about skills-based, decontextualized approaches as inherently white supremacist, and excavates how such a language approach supports white supremacy to thrive. I discuss the significance of centering the fight against white supremacy in our analysis of literary practices, which elucidates the potency of even small amounts of white dominance in institutional mechanisms as detrimental for Black students. As a field, the stagnation of Black student equity and commitment to white hegemony by white educators and administrators across preK through higher education persists. Though some white educators diverge from hegemonic practices, we must consider who benefits and what is sustained when exceptions are used to overlook and not interrogate the norm. This work contributes to the mounting rationales for racial diversification in the teacher workforce.

Anti-immigrant legal violence and grassroots organizing against it have fundamentally shaped the lives of immigrant children and families in the US. This article inquires into the intergenerational literacy, teaching, and learning practices of Latinx immigrants’ political mobilization, drawing on qualitative data from a larger yearlong practitioner inquiry study that involved observant participant field notes, artifacts, photographs, and in-depth interviews with 11 undocumented and documented Latinx immigrants with whom I, a Latina immigrant, shared an organizing practice. Through analysis grounded on literacy as critical sociocultural practice, intergenerational learning, and Chicana/Latina education in everyday life, I argue that Latinx immigrants mobilize against oppression through critical literacy practices that facilitate what I theorize as a “communal pedagogy of resistance.” This is an intergenerational pedagogy enacted in communal spaces that grows from Latinx immigrants’facultad,meaning the critical consciousness and epistemic privilege that results from living in the liminal space of theborderlands. This pedagogy views our community’s cultural, literacy, and linguistic practices as strengths and tools of resilience and resistance, and expands our definition of family and our sense of interdependence to fellow oppressed communities, teaching us to enact inclusive justice. A key takeaway is that Latinx immigrant students’ educational and literacy practices cannot be separated from those of their wider family/community, nor from their intergenerational sociopolitical struggles and expertise. Another is that intergenerational literacy and learning are bi/multidirectional. Implications include the need for educational institutions to learn from this pedagogy, and for additional literacy research into communal sociopolitical mobilization.

This article discusses findings from two interconnected ethnographic studies on the out-of-school literacy practices of Black adolescent males: 18-year-old Khaleeq from the US Northeast, and 18-year-old Rendell from the US Midwest. The data analyzed derive from their engagements in nonschool, community-based, social justice initiatives that, we argue, represent rejections of deficit narratives about who they are (their racialized and gendered identities) and what they allegedly cannot do (their literacy capacities and capabilities). Utilizing a critical literacy approach that attends to out-of-school contexts, race, and counternarratives allows us to demonstrate how they questioned narratives of failure that unfairly place blame on Black youth and not on the structural inequalities endemic to US society. These narratives include (among others): the widening gap in achievement and high school graduation rates between Black and White male students in the United States; the school-to-prison pipeline and increasing drop-out and push-out rates that impact high school–aged Black males; and the overrepresentation of Black males in special education classes. Khaleeq and Rendell used literacies to question these racialized narratives and their consequences, and to produce counternarratives to negative assumptions about Black adolescents. As a result, we focus on how they cultivated their literacies, nurtured their spirits, and charted their own trajectories within community spaces when school was not enough. This analysis offers implications for how literacy practitioners and researchers can narrow the school community divide by lovingly attending to the out-of-school literacies of Black adolescents.

Conducted through a collaboration between the Council of Writing Program Administrators(CWPA) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), this study identified andtested new variables for examining writing’s relationship to learning and development. EightyCWPA members helped to establish a consensus model of 27 effective writing practices. EightyUS baccalaureate institutions appended questions to the NSSE instrument based on these 27practices, yielding responses from 29,634 first-year students and 41,802 seniors. Confirmatoryfactor analysis identified three constructs: Interactive Writing Processes, Meaning-Making WritingTasks, and Clear Writing Expectations. Regression analyses indicated that the constructs werepositively associated with two sets of established constructs in the regular NSSE instrument “DeepApproaches to Learning (Higher-Order Learning, Integrative Learning, and Reflective Learning)and Perceived Gains in Learning and Development as defined by the institution’s contributionsto growth in Practical Competence, Personal and Social Development, and General EducationLearning” with effect sizes that were consistently greater than those for the number of pageswritten. These were net results after controlling for institutional and student characteristics, aswell as other factors that might contribute to enhanced learning. The study adds three empiricallyestablished constructs to research on writing and learning. It extends the positive impact of writing beyond learning course material to include Personal and Social Development. Although correlational, it can provide guidance to instructors, institutions, accreditors, and other stakeholders because of the nature of the questions associated with the effective writing constructs.

Technology is a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives in and out of schools, yet it escapes the sustained scrutiny of education researchers who contribute to the wider “orthodoxy of optimism” (Selwyn, 2014) accompanying all things technological. Challenging such orthodoxy begins with greater precision in language, replacing the broadness of technology with the more accurate specificity of software (Kitchin & Dodge, 2011). This essay conceptually frames how software space—a term I use to refer to complex computational assemblages—affects the teaching of literature, arguing that software-powered technologies can be conducive to rigorous forms of literary study and research if they are used with an understanding of both the nature of software and the contexts in which software is produced and promoted. I draw on English education and related fields to propose the establishment of what I call new literatures.

Currently, African American girls are being depicted as overly sexual, violent, or confrontational, are judged by physical features, or are invisible across mainstream media and within school classrooms. Few investigations have explored how they respond to and interpret such imposed representations. Nor, for the most part, have studies examined how girls represent themselves among a society of others pathologizing and defining who they are. This inquiry investigated self-representations in the writings of eight African American adolescent girls ages 12–17 who participated in a historically grounded literacy collaborative. Coupling sociohistorical and critical sociocultural theories, I organized and analyzed their writings through open, axial, and selective coding. Findings show that the girls wrote across platforms similar to those African American women have addressed historically, which included writing to represent self, writing to resist or counter ascribed representations, and writing toward social change. The girls wrote multiple and complex representations, which included ethnic, gender, intellectual, kinship,—sexual, individual, and community representations. These findings suggest their writings served as hybrid spaces for the girls to explore, make sense of, resist, and express different manifestations of self. The representations the girls created in their writings did not fall into static notions of culture or identity. Instead, their self-representations were socially constructed and were responsive to their lives. This study extends the extant research by offering wider views of representations from the girls’ voices, as well as a broadened historical lens to view their reading and writing with implications for how English language arts educators can reconceptualize the roles of writing in classrooms.

While the topic of plagiarism in student writing has received much attention in previous research, relatively few studies have examined teachers’ perceptions of plagiarism, and these have tended to focus on how teachers from English L1 countries understand plagiarism (Flint, Macdonald, & Clegg, 2006). Yet given that approximately 80% of English teachers worldwide are nonnative English speakers (Braine, 2010), research that can shed light on these teachers’ practices of defining, detecting, and preventing plagiarism in student writing is urgently needed. The present exploratory study considers teachers’ perceptions and cultural constructions of plagiarism in student writing in Taiwan. Results from a survey and interviews with 23 Taiwanese teachers reveal that a number of cultural factors influenced student plagiarism during writing. These teachers understood plagiarism as being influenced by the Chinese words piaoqie (to rob and steal) and chaoxi (to copy and steal). They also suggested that an emphasis on social relationships and reciprocity in writing, in addition to students’ lack of experience in citing sources appropriately, may lead to both intentional and unintentional plagiarism in students’ writing. These results suggest that plagiarism in this Taiwanese context might be a by-product of the Confucian educational tradition that emphasizes memorization and repetition. Unintentional plagiarism could be closely linked to unawareness. In this case, lack of intentional wrongdoing by students may be due to the influence of culturally rooted definitions of the word plagiarism, suggesting that inexperience is likely to be a contributing factor behind student plagiarism. Implications for pedagogy and further research are suggested.

With graduate training only in literary research methods, the author built a successful career focused on issues of student plagiarism. Gradually, however, she came to realize that her claims about plagiarism were based on local observation and personal experience; they could not persuade wide audiences. Late in her career, she began doing large-scale, data-based research that allows her to persuade wider audiences; the data-based research has also challenged and revised some of her earlier claims about plagiarism.

By examining how a student from Vietnam used English to interact with her peers in an English-medium secondary school in Singapore, this paper argues for an examination of language and literacy development through a cosmopolitan lens. Building on earlier research on cosmopolitanism (e.g., Campano & Ghiso, 2011; Canagarajah, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c; Hansen, 2010; Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2010), I illustrate how a broader understanding of cosmopolitanism in language and literacy education is timely in the wake of contemporary transcultural flows that characterize globalization, the emergence of a neoliberal order in education, and a pressing need to address educational inequities encountered by the growing number of immigrant learners whose home languages may not be valued in classrooms. The data in this paper, which include politicalspeeches, school documents, and classroom interactions, are part of a larger, yearlong critical ethnographic study and are subjected to microethnographic discourse analysis (Bloome & Carter, 2014). Through investigating how local interactional events are linked to broader events in wider Singapore society, I demonstrate how my Vietnamese focal student and her Singaporean peers were able to enact and develop a cosmopolitan outlook. Implications on language and literacy development are also discussed.

This article provides an initial approach for capturing moments of talk about, around, and for writing to explain why writing groups and writing conferences are so often considered “transformative” for the people involved. After describing the widespread and yet disparate transformations so often attributed to collaborative writing talk, I introduce applied conversation analysis (CA) as a method for getting at what is often difficult to identify, document, and explain: the intricacies of moments that underlie, if not directly account for, transformations. At the core of this article, I present a case study of a writer, Susan, and tutor, Kim, and analyze their talk and embodied interactions around writing. In particular, two sequences of their talk—the first an example of “troubles telling,” or attending to a reported trouble (Jefferson, 1981, 1984, 1988) and the second an enactment of humor that names asymmetrical power relations (Holmes, 2000)—illustrate the ways in which building affiliative relationships might allow for naming and poking fun at, if not restructuring, power relations. Further, self-reports from interview data indicate how the occasions of talk between Susan and Kim mark shifts in thinking about themselves, their writing, and their commitments—shifts that can be attributed to their relational, affiliative interactions and that provide supporting evidence for the transformative power of collaborative writing talk.

This article discusses the ways issues of audience and authority are encountered and addressed by classroom teachers who write journal articles for publication. Drawing on an interview study of K-12 classroom teachers who have published articles in NCTE’s journals Language Arts, Voices from the Middle, and English Journal, we show that teachers developed and deployed strikingly different conceptions of audience at different points in their composing process. Before and after writing, they acknowledged the wide and mixed readership of those journals, including university-based scholars; however, while drafting their articles they thought about a much more limited group of “teachers like them.” In doing so, these teacher-authors found a concrete way to navigate the contested place of classroom teachers in wider education discourses. We highlight two major implications of this work. First, it complicates the standard advice to writers to “know your audience,” showing instead how considerations of audience are closely linked to questions of one’s status relative to members of that audience. Second, our work might complicate understandings of legitimate peripheral participation and how members of communities of practice are positioned relative to one another vis-à-vis authority: teacher-authors manipulated notions of authority, temporarily redefining some readers as more central and others as more peripheral, in ways that shifted according to the authority stances those definitions allowed them to take in composing.

Using a sociohistoric developmental lens, this paper traces the construction of texts composed by fifth graders in an urban classroom in order to answer the following questions: How do children develop as writers in school? How do writing and drawing function in children’s texts? How do teaching practices shape children’s writing development? Ethnographic data collected in a fifthgrade classroom reveal how children used drawing to create classroom texts. Data show that drawing is not simply a developmental preface to writing. Rather, when given guided intellectual freedom, children integrate writing, drawing, and pictures in sophisticated and creative ways. The author traces children’s text development to show how schooling as an institution bounds and limits their use of their authorial prerogatives, their textual possibilities, and ultimately their developmental potential. She concludes by asserting that we must reconsider development in writing to include not only orthographic symbols, but also the wide array of communicative tools that children bring to writing. Any analysis of development that fails to include an analysis of the corresponding institutional practices and ideologies is liable to be no more than a contribution to the efficacy of that developmental model.

A sharp increase in the proportion of informational text with the corresponding expansion of cognitive demands and conceptual structures is a widely held explanation for the decline inreading achievement at the fourth-grade level. In this study, differences in the proportion of informational text across the second, third, and fourth grades were examined in order to determine if this perennial explanation for the fourth-grade slump was supported. Available print materials in 15 classrooms (5 per grade) and time spent with texts in written language activities were coded and analyzed by text type following Duke’s (2000) data-collection procedures. The proportion of informational text in classrooms was slightly higher in grade 2; in classroom environmental print it was highest in grade 3, followed by grade 4 and then grade 2; in classroom written language activities it showed a marked increase from grades 2 to 3, with that increase sustained in grade 4. Total instructional time with informational text was an average of 1 minute in grade 2 and 16 minutes in grades 3 and 4. The most common instructional activities with informational text were reading to complete a worksheet and round-robin reading.

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.

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy of formulaic writing such as the five-paragraph theme (FPT) or essay for the purpose of earning high scores on high-stakes writing assessments. This qualitative descriptive study analyzed more than 1000 essays from Delaware Grade 8 and 10 writers, written for a statewide direct-writing assessment.

Researchers are freer now than ever before to pursue a wide variety of research questions approached from diverse theoretical perspectives through the use of many different research tools. The cost of this freedom is the necessity to outline theoretical frameworks for study and to explain how that theory informs the tools of research. The studies in this issue of RTE serve as models of the methodological clarity and rigor that are now required in scholarly research.

Twice a year, in the May and November issues, RTE publishes a selected bibliography of recent research in the teaching of English. Most of the studies appeared during the six-month period preceding the compilation of the bibliography (June through December, 2000, for the present bibliography), but some studies that appeared earlier are occasionally included. The listing is selective; we make no attempt to include all research and research-related articles that appeared in the period under review. Comments on the bibliography and suggestions about items for inclusion may be directed to the bibliography editors. We encourage you to send your suggestions to djbrown@ucok.edu, kalman@data.net.mx, stinsona@uwwvax.uww.edu, or melissa.whiting@usm.edu. You may also submit comments or recommend publications through the Annotated Bibliography page of RTE’s World Wide Web site at http://www.ncte.org/rte/.

Historically, the Bible has occupied a prominent—though sometimes disruptive—position in American education. The 1963 Bible study benchmark case, Abington v. Schempp (1963), ruled that the Bible is worthy of study, and that such study is constitutional. Both religious and educational organizations support a literary study of the Bible in public schools because it is great literature and because it is foundational for understanding Western culture. The purpose of this study was to determine the current, actual place of Bible literature in high school English classes and the reasons that affect its place. The study used quantitative and qualitative methods: survey, interviews, and observations. It included observations of three models of teaching Biblical literature: a) a full-year elective course, b) a required grade unit, and c) a Bible unit in a humanities course. The study found that Bible literature seems to play an extremely small role in high school literature programs. While 81% of high school English teachers reported it was important to teach some Bible literature, only 10% taught a Bible unit or course. High school textbooks average one fourth of one percent (.260%) from the Bible. Though 55% of college English instructors personally recommended that secondary English majors take a Biblical literature course, only 38% had done so. The wide gap between recommended study and actual study of the Bible is filled with misinformation, contradictory attitudes, and confusion. Two problems of teaching Bible literature are: dealing with religious beliefs and non-beliefs of teachers, parents, and students; and overcoming ignorance. Some college professors, administrators, English department chairs, and librarians did not know what Bible literature was taught in their schools or that teaching Bible literature was legal.

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.

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.

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To develop an insider's perspective as to what teachers employ in their efforts to translate instructional theory into occasions for learning, this study represents teachers' perspectives in a way that ( 1 ) identifies some of the legitimate and unexpected resistance to implementing new curriculum, and (2) suggests an analytic model of theoretical and practical value to those interested in curriculum implementation. Two high school teachers collaborated with the researcher to develop writing tasks that would encourage careful thought and learning on the part of the students. Both teachers were observed before and during the time they developed and implemented these writing tasks. On the basis of the field notes and interview transcripts, an analytic model was developed and used to: 1. characterize a single meaning system here defined as a curricular system of meaning; and 2. identify several natural sources of resistance to innovation. The discussion focuses specifically on two components of this meaning system: (a) locus of attention here defined as a critical point of balance in the system which enables the teacher to negotiate a number of delicately balanced and sometimes conflicting concerns, and (b) of instruction, defined as the underlying conditions that influence instructional practice. These conditions include the teacher's conceptions about the source of knowledge, the development of knowledge, and the goals of instruction. Evidence cited suggests that these two concerns are crucial to the effective and efficient working of a system, and that both are thus natural sources of resistance. A number of factors have contributed to the recent interest in writing across the curriculum. Among them is our developing understanding of the relationship between writing and thinking. Work by Emig (1977, 1983), Martin (1976), Hays, Roth, Ramsey, and Foulke (1983) and others indicates that the process of writing affords the writer a special opportunity for thinking and thus for learning. Building on the work of Vygotsky (1962), Luria (1971), and Bruner (1971), Emig (1983) argues that both the act and the product of writing are marked by a number of features which, in her words, correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies (p. 123). In the The research reported here was supported by grant number NIE-G-82-0027 from the National Institute of Education. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of the funding agency. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 20, No. 1, February 1986 69 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.162 on Thu, 30 Jun 2016 05:40:25 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 70 Research in the Teaching of English process of using hand, eye, and brain, the writer may, among other things, sort through ideas, integrate old information with new, and reformulate thoughts. Fostering such processes is especially important since they have been identified as critical intellectual components of more complex forms of