This article makes a case for the importance of integrating public writing pedagogy in and beyond second language (L2) writing classrooms. Public writing is defined as a situated, distributed act of engaging public audiences through writing, with various semiotic resources and modalities, to make meaning, connect, and bring about social change. L2 writers practice public writing deliberately or unwittingly, for various personal or political purposes, and within various discursive contexts. However, such practices are underresearched, undertheorized, and underdiscussed in L2 writing classrooms, which could be partially ascribed to the disciplinary disposition of the field L2 writing and to the ethical concerns regarding cultural assimilation. The article begins by contextualizing the definitions of public writing in relation to L2 writing. It then explains why it is important to discuss public writing in an L2 writing classroom and consider public writing a legitimate L2 writing issue while acknowledging the pedagogical resistance. In particular, the article highlights the decolonial potential of practicing public writing in an L2. In the final section, the article offers pedagogical guidelines and a graphic framework concerning the “where” and “how” of teaching public writing in an L2.

Using both a Bakhtinian and a collaborative writing framework, in this qualitative study, we sought to understand writing practices in one elementary school. Through observations in three classrooms and interviews with students, the study found that students had opportunities to engage in a variety of collaborative writing activities, including supportive contributions and co-constructing a text. When engaging in supportive contributions, students inspired, assisted, or shared their work with peers. In collaborations of a single text, students who had experiences writing with one another negotiated ideas and texts successfully. In pairs where students experienced conflict, there tended to be fewer collaborative moments, and students sought help from the teacher. The study demonstrates that students’ relationships with one another play a significant role in collaborative writing practices and highlights the important role of friendships in successful interactions.

This study explores educator attitudes, beliefs, and experiences regarding writing and writing instruction before and after participating in a week-long Summer Institute (SI) facilitated by leaders at one National Writing Project (NWP) site. Throughout the SI, the 12 educators (i.e., instructional coaches and classroom teachers) participated in personal, creative, and professional writing designed to support them as writers and writing instructors. Study participants completed a survey before the SI and at its conclusion, which captured their perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences about writing and writing instruction, as well as the importance of writing in education. Findings demonstrated that many participants viewed themselves as writers prior to the SI with this amount increasing at the conclusion of the SI, and many reported increased writing confidence. There were inconsistencies in the ways participants defined what it means to “be a writer,” and findings suggest that writer identity is influenced by writing confidence and enjoyment, with some participants struggling to navigate the dual identities of writer and writing teacher. Study findings suggest that addressing the writer-teacher identity crisis is crucial for fostering effective writing instruction. Teachers need time, space, and opportunity to immerse themselves in their writing and practice different skills to then apply to their instruction. Buy-in from school districts to provide such opportunities and a willingness to support teacher autonomy will enable teachers to better support students as writers and engage them in meaningful writing instruction for authentic tasks and audiences.

In 1974, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) drafted a statement recognizing students’ right to their own language. However, many writing classes, including those in college, continue to teach Standard English as the only acceptable language in the classroom. In this article, I argue that a critical place-based college composition course can demonstrate to students that nonstandard dialects can coexist in the writing classroom. Drawing on my experiences teaching critical place-based composition courses, I describe the writing assignments that encourage students to reflect on how their “hometowns” have influenced their current identities as well as to critique the commonly held assumptions that marginalized communities, such as Appalachia, matter less than places with more cultural capital. I also demonstrate how the assignments in this class can encourage students to critique the assumption that Standard English is the only acceptable language in the writing classroom. A critical place-based composition course has the potential to increase students’ sense of belonging in college, inspire students to be more culturally aware of the places they find themselves in, and aid in designing a composition curriculum that is more in line with the CCCC's statement recognizing students’ right to their own language.

Teaching Writing in English as a Foreign Language: Teachers’ Cognition Formation and ReformationH. Zhao and L. J. Zhang. Springer Nature, Switzerland (2022).XXII + 178 pp., € 106.99, ISBN: 978-3-030-99991-9

Effective narrative writers create immersive reader experiences through precise linguistic choices. Teachers can support effective linguistic choice-making in young writers through the process of imaginative embodiment, a method of narrative thinking framed by cognitive stylistics concepts and their embodied effects. In this article, I assess the effects of an imaginative embodiment pedagogy on fifth grade writers’ narratives by examining how their linguistic choices contribute to immersion. As part of the study, four Grade 5 teachers attended a training session on imaginative embodiment and applied the approach throughout a nine-week narrative writing unit with 12 students via one-on-one writing conferences. To study the effects of the approach, a linguistic analysis was conducted on student writing completed before and after the writing unit. The analysis was driven by a stylistic checklist that codes grammatical features to embodied effects, as well as an interpretive analysis of these features’ overall effectiveness on immersion. Findings suggested that students’ linguistic choices changed in response to learning the process of imaginative embodiment. Specifically, choices were characterized by their embodied effects, contributing to greater textual immersion. This suggests that teaching imaginative embodiment can improve writers’ narratives by affording them specific strategies for expressing meaning.

Although the field of heritage language education has thrived in recent years and has focused primarily on the development of biliteracies in Spanish heritage language (SHL) students (e.g., Belpoliti & Bermejo, 2020; Samaniego & Warner, 2016), there is a scarcity of research on SHL students’ writing practices. Moreover, instructional practices and technological developments have transformed the landscape of SHL writing, underscoring the need to understand SHL students’ practices and perceptions of writing. The present study explores this gap in the literature by reporting on an online survey taken by 96 SHL students in the United States. SHL students reported a desire to improve their writing and regarded linguistic issues (e.g., accuracy, accent marks, and writing conventions) as their primary challenges. They considered technology helpful while writing in Spanish, but their use of social tools was not widespread. Although student responses often aligned with educators’ perspectives from previous research (Padial et al., 2024), students reported using English to plan their writing more frequently than instructors reported teaching the use of English as strategy. Students overestimated the importance that their instructors gave to grammar and orthography/accentuation.

This study presents findings and strategies found to be successful through encouraging reflective thinking about classroom practices related to access, equity, and diversity. We asked, ‘How does classroom practice change when teachers reflect on equitable instruction? Do teachers recognize biased practices in their classroom? How might a teacher’s instruction unknowingly create barriers for students, thus limiting student learning?’ Over the course of one semester, participants worked collaboratively to reflect on equitable classroom practices to affect student voices. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the study was conducted through virtual discussions and online platforms. Here, we share reflections that surfaced during the online discussions.

This paper describes a fieldwork program and companion tool, The Teaching of Writing Framework, that college-based teacher educators and teachers from the Hudson Valley Writing Project, a site of the National Writing Project, developed over a three-year period. Central to the fieldwork program is an apprenticeship that allows future teachers to assist mentor teachers in a summer enrichment program for adolescent writers. The apprenticeship, coupled with reflective writing and mediated by the framework, allows future teachers to practice, identify, and reflect on writing instruction in which writing functions as a tool for learning and humanization.

In this reflective article, we draw upon Richardson’s (2002) advice for configuring words to view the world through poetry, through an analysis of our own social and digital selves into and through the early days of COVID-19. Verselove is a month-long digital poetry challenge, a space to welcome teacher-writers from around the world to create, learn, and share. Through the common passion for poetry, Verselove is a space of new creative professional growth and inquiry through a poetic lens. Since we did not come to Verselove as a research project or with this framework in place, we share what Verselove is and then offer our theorizing about how we are coming to understand this poetic professional development project.

This reflective article discusses lessons learned when Reading Landscapes & Writing Nature, an annual collaboration between a National Writing Project site and Weir Farm National Historical Park, migrated online in 2020 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The organizations have used critical pedagogies of place (Gruenewald, 2003) since 2017 to guide teacher writing workshops, and reimagined the professional development in digital spaces with multimodal literacies (Kinloch, 2009; Kress, 2003). This including 360 photospheres and Padlet as tools to expand educators’ understandings of literacy, wellness, and place.

The spring and summer of 2020 were rife with tension emanating from hate speech, racial violence, and a global health pandemic. Educators deliberated over the uncertainties of equitable access to learning, healthcare, and wellbeing. This article will describe how the Red Mountain Writing Project created a third space (Gutierrez, 2008) grounded by Critical Race Theory (CRT) in education (Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001; Solorzano & Yosso, 2001) and Historically Responsive Literacy (Muhammad, 2020) to center the lives of teachers, their experiences, and their stories during a tumultuous time. The authors will share how they built and maintained a supportive virtual space for teachers to critically examine and reflect on their lived experiences, social awareness, sense of agency, and anti-racist teaching and writing practices. Now, after more than two years, teacher-writer communities are especially needed – third spaces where teachers from diverse backgrounds can hold space together and engage in writing to heal, find joy, empathize, and amplify their experiential knowledges.

This piece reflects on a secondary teacher’s attempt to empower her students during the Covid Pandemic crisis schooling response in the United States. In this article, the students engage with their hybrid identities and lived experiences to build skills and criticality toward cultivating the changemaker within themselves. Selections of student testimony and the reflexive practices of the teacher are centered in the explanation of a project rooted in Culturally and Historically Responsive literacy.

In this reflective article, a case study, we draw upon scholarship on a critical friendship (Schuck & Russell, 2005; Silva, 2003) that grew in 2020 as we worked to assist one another in creating NWP writing programs for teachers and youth. At the heart of our professional collaboration was our desire to maintain and cultivate community engagement (Deans, Roswell, & Wurr, 2010; Preece, 2017), while advancing racial literacies in digital spaces (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021) and as we worked with a framework for instructional equity (Muhammad, 2020). Weekly meetings led us to using Padlet for 189 hours of professional development, 9 programs with 511 youth, and 7 courses with 320 students. Padlet became a location for curation, especially as we worked to promote diverse, inclusive children’s and young adult texts as models for classroom teacher and student writers.

This study explores teacher perspectives and beliefs on writing instruction in the Swedish Language Introduction Program (LI) through interviews with six teachers in Swedish as a second language. The study was guided by the following research questions: How do the teachers construct the students discursively, including the students’ educational background and prior knowledge? How do the teachers frame writing instruction, as evident by their discourses? LI is an upper secondary school program framed for newly arrived students, 15 to 18 years old, who need to qualify for mainstream programs by attaining the goals of compulsory school year 9. The study is framed within theory on second language writing instruction and teachers’ beliefs. The teachers’ discourses of writing instruction were analyzed against theory on second language writing instruction, genre pedagogy, and practices of care, and related to the teachers’ discursive constructions of the group of students as vulnerable and heterogeneous. All teachers exploited genre pedagogy, with its emancipatory aims, to enable access to the genres of schooling. The teachers’ expressed aims were directed toward long-term goals, such as employability and democratic participation. The teachers were firmly based in both theory and experience, which the demanding context seemed to require. In spite of indisputable challenges, the teachers conveyed a sense of belief in the possibilities of teaching.

Concerns about teaching structured authoring, which is the use of software in technical writing to allow automatic textual reuse and reassembly, have been woven into the debate about what role technologies should play in preparing technical writing students for ‘real world’ needs since the late 1990s (see Brumberger & Laurer, 2015; Carnegie & Crane, 2019; Kimball, 2015; Rainey et al., 2018). Vee (2017) and others have argued that fundamental aspects of writing software code, many of which parallel structured authoring, are now required literacies. Indeed, as Gentle (2017) demonstrates, the difference between those writing code and those writing structured authoring continues to shrink. Helping to develop technical writers to understand this overlap remains a significant challenge. This article suggests that this challenge might be met by using an open-source interactive fiction authoring platform called Twine, which provides many of the building blocks of structured authoring while teaching fundamental aspects of coding. However, this approach is not without its perils. Through analyzing the findings of a two-year study, this article identifies potential avenues for success as well as potential pitfalls to be mindfully considered.

In view of the limited research attention so far given to the developing cognition of novice L2 writing teachers, this qualitative study examines the extent to which L2 writing teacher cognition can be enhanced by the experience of tutoring. By adopting the theory of experiential learning, the study considered the role that the experience of tutoring could play in the development of novice L2 writing teachers’ conceptualizations of learners’ needs and their view of themselves as developing L2 writing teachers. The results of this study point to the participants as having all made realizations that served as catalysts for continued growth after the original tutoring experiences. These findings indicate that the practice of tutoring changed their perceptions of teaching L2 writing by seeing clearly the benefits of dialogic interaction with L2 writers and also learning the value of holistically viewing the writer.

This reflection focuses on teaching writing online for the first-year students in the Academic English course at the Westminster International University in Tashkent (WIUT), Uzbekistan. Academic English is a core course for all incoming first-year students and aims to develop students’ proficiency in listening, reading, and writing skills. A great emphasis is placed on the development of writing skills, and students are required to write at least four summaries, two essays, and one reflection during the twelve weeks of the first semester. A new challenging component in the autumn 2020 semester was teaching writing online, due to the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The classroom writing processes were examined through the lens of the Self- and Socially-Regulated Multilingual Writing model (Akhmedjanova, 2020), which revealed prevalence of socially-regulated rather than self-regulated writing practices. Also, teachers instructed students to use revision strategies more than planning and formulating writing strategies. A cursory examination of students’ reflections suggested that many students struggled with the environment and time management skills. Future revisions to the Academic English course should include explicit teaching of planning and formulating writing strategies along with planning and time management skills.

Teaching and Learning Writing in ESL/EFL. Rachael Ruegg. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, Beijing (2021). × + 177 Pp., ¥28.00, ISBN: 978-7-5213-2455-6 (pbk)

This article explores illuminative evaluation as a method to reflectively assess a pilot implementation of an intercultural-competence-focused first-year writing curriculum at a US large public university. The goal of this curriculum is to promote integration of diverse student populations on our university campus, while developing all students’ intercultural competence and writing skills. In this article, we present practitioner reflections on classroom experiences and collaborative design of our approach to data analysis. These reflections show how an illuminative, context-rich approach to an early phase of a writing pedagogy research project shapes a holistic curricular evaluation. Illuminative evaluation drew our attention to the interaction between teaching and curriculum evaluation as well as to how this approach promotes an invitational and exploratory approach to teacher research.

This paper presents, discusses, and evaluates research-based materials for English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) teaching, based on a study conducted with exiled academics supported by CARA (Council for At-Risk Academics) and their UK-based co-authors who provided textual interventions on their texts. Using data from interviews with exiled academics and their UK-based co-authors/mentors as well as their article drafts and textual interventions, we present teaching materials for ERPP workshops aimed at raising the participants’ awareness of issues that may arise in co-authorship involving asymmetrical power relations, such as those between exiled academics and their UK-based co-authors/mentors. The materials take the shape of data-based scenarios which ask workshop attendees to consider experiential co-authorship narratives involving (i) the issue of ‘parochialism’, i.e., failure to indicate the relevance of one’s research to a larger audience, (ii) issues with the type and amount of feedback regarding writer development and text production, (iii) blurred lines of co-authorship roles, and (iv) authority issues in interdisciplinary collaborative writing. Each scenario is followed by a research-informed discussion. We argue that scenario-based awareness-raising activities can sensitize all parties in asymmetrical co-authorship pairs/groups to common challenges that arise in such collaborations, help them navigate collaborative writing successfully, and encourage them to reflect on their own co-authorship practices. We conclude by discussing the merits of the scenario-based approach to developing materials for ERPP teaching.

In this article, we present a novel framework for identifying young students’ writing development in the first years of primary school (age 6–8 years). It was developed to analyse a large number of student texts (n = 803), all in the format of digitised books, as part of the large-scale Danish research project titled Teaching Platform for Developing and Automatically Tracking Early Stage Literacy Skills (ATEL, 2018–2023). In this project, based on a text-oriented model of writing, we aim to gain insights into less considered dimensions of emergent writing. Specifically, we consider how young students construct sentences and expand their meaning-making repertoires in this regard, as well as how they tie a whole text together and begin to express interpersonal meaning. In developing the framework, we took inspiration from both formal and functional linguistic approaches to young students’ writing development and constructed a comprehensive framework to examine the first steps into ways of communicating through writing in school. Furthermore, through a theory-and data-driven process, we developed the framework to suit emergent writing in the educational and language context in Denmark. In addition to presenting the framework in this article, we discuss its limitations and potentials for research and practice.

This paper aims to validate scales for the early development of writing proficiency based on a framework used to linguistically describe multiple dimensions of writing development in 6–9 year-old Danish-speaking students and to lay the statistical foundation for empirically describing proficiency levels in emergent writers. The analysis is based on the Rasch model and was conducted on texts (n = 803) written by Year 0–2 students using the computer app WriteReader. The paper introduces both the model and the theory behind it, including the rationale for using this model, and it presents the main analytical steps taken and decisions made in the study, which is part of the large-scale Danish research project entitled Teaching Platform for Developing and Automatically Tracking Early Stage Literacy Skills (ATEL, 2018–2023). The results show that it is possible to identify detailed levels of early writing development in four dimensions: 1) text construction, 2) sentence construction, 3) verbals, and 4) modifiers.

Despite the growing prominence of writing in both educational contexts and society at large, research-based knowledge about the development of writing remains lacking, particularly regarding the developmental trajectories that students pass through as they encounter and grapple with the complex system of more formal writing during their primary years of school. This article presents a study that examined writing development in Danish primary grade students (ages 6 to 8) from a linguistic perspective to identify developmental patterns in students’ writing skills during these years. In the study, we applied a multidimensional analytical framework based on a text-oriented model of writing, for the coding of a large number of digitalised student texts (N=803). Subsequently, we analysed the coding results using statistical Rasch theory. Through this procedure, we were able to identify developmental patterns in the students’ writing in the form of different proficiency groups along four textual dimensions and to describe a number of linguistic levels for each dimension. Furthermore, the article discusses didactic potentials and limits from using proficiency groups when teaching writing in primary grades.

Although infographics have been used for educational purposes, their specific use for teaching process-based writing in undergraduate writing courses is not documented in the literature. When integrating infographics into a process-based writing instructional approach, they may offer students multiple means of representation, engagement, and expression – universal design for learning principles. We examined one undergraduate writing course that integrated infographics into a process-based writing approach to understand student experiences and uses of this multimodal communication form. Results show that infographics have unique benefits and challenges to supporting student writing. Results also reveal that students used their infographics for revising, transferring, and rethinking the content of their subsequent, text-only research papers. This work has implications for college composition pedagogy.

Students face multiple challenges when transitioning from high school to college writing, with new content, audiences, genres, and task expectations. Psychometric researchers have shown that self-efficacy, competency, and affective factors can help or hinder students during this transition, but little previous research examines what students themselves say about their writing and writing experiences. This study analyses the content of 248 essays from first-year composition writers who discussed their writing identities, processes, products, and journeys. Our findings show differences between writers who view themselves positively and negatively. Instructors can use this information to design meaningful prompts, utilize process writing activities, and engage students in meaningful reflection.

This pedagogical reflection describes the interactions within, and effectiveness of, an instructional approach for writing – the teaching/learning cycle (TLC). The instruction takes place in a northwestern, midsized city of Russia in a secondary school specializing in English with a 10th grade/form group who self-selected into a strand for the sciences (i.e., students take additional courses in the sciences versus the arts). The reflection combines Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory and concept of molar activity with TLC to demonstrate how various systems influence the teacher and students in a secondary-schooling context. The TLC approach assisted the Russian-speaking students in the improvement of English persuasive writing. The molar, or propelling, interactions in the writing lessons demonstrate a fluidity of knowledge across the systems of the ecology. The study may be of use to teachers instructing writing in English and to comparative education scholars who focus on classroom interaction to inform their work on culture.

The recent focus on threshold concepts in writing studies indicates the field’s growing commitment to engaging writing-based threshold concepts in the daily work of teaching and learning to facilitate writing transfer. However, although there is growing evidence of robust scholarly work in this area, research on the pedagogical importance of these concepts to the writing development and tutoring of L2 students is still in its nascent stages. To address this gap, this paper first presents findings from a research study that aims to understand how writing centre tutors addressed the needs of L2 students in tutoring sessions and the extent to which threshold-oriented language appeared in the content of the conference summaries. After discussing the findings, the paper proposes a threshold concept-based framework for tutoring L2 writers involving two established concepts: ‘writers’ histories, processes, and identities vary’ and ‘writing is informed by prior experiences.’ In addition, a new model of the conference summary as a reflective tool to promote writing transfer is presented along with a discussion of emergent writing centre-oriented concepts that reimagine the role of the tutor as an ‘expert-outsider’ and the L2 student as ‘informed novice.’

I set out in this article to address the question of whether it is possible to be creative and agentive when the written content involves information of a factual, statistical, or empirical nature. In examining the matter of creativity and agentivity in such writing, I seek to locate my understanding of both areas in the realm of the situated, subjective, and the reflexive, and the expression of creativity as an enactment and enablement of these three qualitative dimensions through(out) the fluidity and contingency of the composing process and experience. My discussion first provides an account of my own reflexive positioning as a writing teacher. This section is followed by a review of relevant literature in the area of academic literacies and the way knowledge and disciplinarity as they are captured and naturalized in written text may be challenged for their supposed representation of static and depersonalized views of meaning. Thereafter I consider PW308 – a course in scientific project report writing – and feedback from a group of third-year chemistry students with respect to the situatedness of their individual experiences as they went about composing their project report.

While social work educators have explored strategies to improve literacy development among their students, many educators continue to strive for a better integration of effective reading and writing skills. This article presents the findings of a survey that used qualitative research methods to assess the outcomes of a doctorate in social work program that employed a specialist in composition. Doctorate in social work students reported on the skill of ‘close reading’ as it related to their own writing, practice, university teaching, and field supervision. Data analysis reveals that these students had not previously learned the close reading skills necessary for strong writing skills. This article extends support for a full integration of close reading as a way to improve writing, clinical mental health practice, and critical thinking skills.

Drawing upon cognitive writing process theory and research, this study investigates the influence of language of writing, foreign language (FL) proficiency and gender on the revision processes of 77 undergraduate students studying at an English-medium college in Oman. Their first language (L1) was Arabic and their FL was English. The participants produced two argumentative authentic texts, one in L1 and one in FL. Their proficiency in English was assessed using the Oxford Placement Test (OPT). Participants’ revisions were recorded and analysed, according to the measures amount, location and type, via keystroke logging. The results showed that the vast majority of revisions in both languages were immediate, i.e. at the point of inscription, and focused on language rather than content. In addition, there was consistent evidence that participants made more revisions in the FL than they did in L1. For ‘total amount of revision’ and ‘immediate revisions’, there was a consistent interaction between gender and FL proficiency. The pattern of the interaction indicated two conflicting tendencies: (a) female participants appeared in general to be more motivated to make revisions in both languages than males, and (b) the less proficient they were in FL the more revisions they made. By contrast, the number of revisions made by the male participants did not depend on their FL proficiency. For ‘distant’, i.e. already written text, and ‘end’, i.e. after producing the first draft, revisions the amount of revision depended solely on the language of writing and gender. Furthermore, the results revealed that when writing in the FL, students with greater FL proficiency attended to content revision more than language revision. Findings are discussed in light of process-oriented writing research and implications for writing research and teaching are suggested.

This action research study began with classroom observations of a learning cycle informed English as a Foreign Language writing class (referred to as the first learning context) for the purposes of creating a general how-to guide for implementing a learning cycle within a writing course. The guide was then implemented in a writing skills class in a different educational context (referred to as the second learning context). A learning cycle was introduced to help learners become more accustomed to peer-editing, giving peer feedback, performing self-assessments and being more critical of their own work. It was found that the learning cycle functioned very differently in the second learning context and not entirely as intended, despite modifications that were made to account for differences between the two learning contexts. Teacher reflections revealed that differences between the reasons for using a learning cycle, assumptions about the similarities between learning contexts (the two courses and their content), decisions regarding changes to the second contexts’ learning materials, differences in student population and other unforeseen differences affected how the learning cycle operated. Critical interactions with sample performance writing texts, the provision or collaborative development of assessment criteria and feedback prompts for peer-editing, materials which support reflection on each task and at the end of the course, and additional class time spent on reflective discussion are all identified as key components of a learning cycle when used in an EFL writing class. The reflections also revealed that learning cycles can have utility when applied to contexts vastly different to those from where they were developed. Recommendations and suggested supporting resources for teachers interested in implementing learning cycles within their own contexts are provided.

This paper shows the development of an innovative teaching project conducted with students of two different degrees: Hispanic studies and modern languages and translation, at the University of Alcalá. This interdisciplinary experience sought to connect students taking their initial steps into poetry writing with translators approaching poetic translation for the first time. With this in mind, the creation of a bilingual collection of poems was proposed. Firstly, students in Hispanic studies would create some poems that could be translated, or rather recreated by the translation students. The main objectives of this interdisciplinary project were to promote creative writing, encourage group work, and increase students’ motivation – as well as to reinforce both the use of English as a foreign language and the practice of literary translation by crafting and subsequently translating original texts created by the students themselves. Moreover, the project is also beneficial for the enrichment and refinement of the education process in general and of poetry translation teaching practices in particular.

This qualitative study examines academic support practices and students’ experiences and perspectives in a graduate nursing education program that has, for many years, emphasized research and writing by requiring aspiring nurse practitioners to pursue publication in peer-reviewed clinical research journals. In collaboration with faculty, practitioner researchers from the university’s postsecondary learning center developed and facilitated group workshops and provided students with individual consultations on research processes and manuscript development. The researchers wrote field notes and researcher memos, administered workshop evaluations, and interviewed seven participants to better understand students’ writer identities and whether writing for the discipline of nursing with the support of peers, faculty, and learning instructors led to any changes in both their individual and collective sense of disciplinary identity. More broadly, this study interrogated the role of a postsecondary learning center employing an academic literacies pedagogical approach (Lea and Street, 1998; Lillis and Scott, 2007) in working with faculty to support students’ writing for a specific discipline. Findings suggest that graduate nursing students felt anxiety and uncertainty about claiming disciplinary expertise and competence as writers. This affective experience made it difficult for students to align their understandings of nursing as a discipline, rooted in their field experiences as professionals, with a more academic conceptualization that they believed to be represented by the research and writing practices required for the assignment. By engaging with the learning center as a third space (Gutiérrez, 2008), the students explored these challenges and experimented with writing practices, directions for their research, and the conceptualization of their profession as they modified their understanding of what was possible for scholarly writing and research in nursing as a discipline and what they could contribute individually as emerging scholars. This study has implications for teaching academic writing practices in nursing contexts, as well as other academic disciplines and for forming generative collaborations between postsecondary learning centers and subject experts.

Using a multidisciplinary approach to social justice teaching, this article explores the often invisible impact of double consciousness on adult English language learners in the United States and provides examples of classroom practice that invite students to reflect on its effects. The experience of double consciousness is examined as it relates to English language learner identities. A Critical Language Awareness (CLA) framework and identity-conscious teaching practices are explored to encourage student participation and reflection. This approach, demonstrated through examples used in writing classes, encourages the exploration of identity in the face of oppression by interrogating social constructions and fiction and nonfiction stories containing connected themes. Three classroom lessons and consequent writing are analyzed with a critical discourse lens to examine student responses and reflections on language and identity. Student writing demonstrates that encouraging English language classes to interrogate the language of institutionalized inequity and identity formation can illuminate potential influences of double consciousness, which can empower students to think critically about their identities and choose whether to take steps to mediate the ways in which they could be affected by double consciousness.

This paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of Halliday’s Sydney School genrebased approach in teaching Chinese written composition to South Asian ethnic minority students in Hong Kong. Chinese language, with its heightened status in Hong Kong, holds a key for South Asians with low socio-economic status to obtain upward mobility (Shum, Gao, Tsung, and Ki, 2011). However, South Asian ethnic minority students, as a disadvantaged group of second language learners, lack sufficient parental and institutional support in Chinese language learning. The genrebased pedagogy derived from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) was applied in this study to improve Chinese language performance of South Asian ethnic minority students for a better chance to participate in mainstream society. The SFL approach is primarily concerned with language choice in social situations and has been widely applied in sociolinguistics (Hyland, 2007, 2012). Its latest model in language teaching methodology, the ’Reading to Learn, Learning to Write’ (R2L) pedagogy, is a genre-based teaching strategy which is designed to guide students to experience different levels of language through extensive classroom reading and writing activities with selected texts. The current study is intended to extend the approach to teaching and learning Chinese as a second language. The employment of genre-based pedagogy aims to support South Asian students with their learning of Chinese written composition in the senior secondary curriculum. The Chinese teachers involved were first provided with appropriate training in the genre-based approach to language teaching focusing on the genres of Narration and Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use theand Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use the and Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use the genre-based teaching approach, by means of pre- and post-tests after and before genre instruction. Text analysis based on SFL was then employed to analyze the students’ written composition in both pre- and post-tests in order to understand the effectiveness of the genre-based pedagogy in teaching Chinese as a second language. The finding shows that the students at the high, medium, and low levels improved both in the construction of schematic structure and the variation of lexicogrammatical choices from the whole-text, sentence and word levels respectively in their writing performance. Hopefully, the findings will help curriculum development and teacher education for teaching Chinese as a second language to non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong and beyond.

Writing about environmental and sustainability issues has grown in popularity, especially in lower-division writing courses. Yet, for teachers and writing program administrators, what are the benefits and drawbacks in asking students to interact with place-based discourses? How does implementing an ecocomposition curriculum and sustainability topics in first-year composition affect students’ writing outcomes? This article discusses a two-year, case study at a comprehensive research university of an experimental course-design model involving 1,421 students and 63 teachers. Students engaged with the university’s sustainability theme in Composition I, as well as other courses. This article includes a description of Composition I’s framework and its assessment practices, and raters measure the writing outcomes for the class’s major essay, a literature review. Overall, teachers utilizing ecocomposition practices presented students with a cohesive, relevant curriculum and assisted them in developing and organizing the literature review; writing and thinking about diverse spaces related to their experiences, majors, and futures; and forging and documenting campus and local ties, including through community-based learning. The study’s results have implications for teaching ecocomposition and sustainability themes in first-year composition.

This article identifies how a cohort of preservice teachers educated during the No Child Left Behind Era thought about the teaching of writing when they entered a secondary English Language Arts (ELA) teacher preparation program. Most participants shared the beliefs that: (1) writing was primarily the demonstration of specific skills, often on a standardized test; (2) alternatives to the five-paragraph essay would be extra, with formulaic writing central to instruction; (3) teachers had little role in student writing development beyond assigning writing; (4) feedback on writing should be ‘objective’ and tied to a grade; and (5) the purpose of ELA is primarily to teach literature. Authors believe identifying preservice teachers’ beliefs about writing and the role of the writing teacher at the beginning of a program can help teacher educators design experiences to expand students’ notions of literacy and of writing instruction.

Writing is a skill which is actively taught in both first (L1) and foreign language (FL) classrooms, yet surprisingly few cross-curricular links are made. This paper, aimed at both practitioners and researchers, presents a framework for designing and implementing a strategy-based, cross-curricular approach to writing pedagogy in schools. It first considers the factors which should be taken into account when designing such an intervention in both L1 and FL classrooms. It then outlines the key steps in the implementation of such a programme of strategy-based instruction. To exemplify this, the paper reports on data throughout from an empirical study involving a classroom intervention of explicit strategy-based instruction which was delivered first in the German FL classroom, and later also in the English classroom of a Year 9 (age 13–14) class in a secondary school in England. The aim was to help students to develop their writing strategies and to encourage transfer between languages. Findings suggest that while a programme of strategy-based instruction can improve strategy use and attainment in writing within a particular language context, effects are most powerful when there is collaboration between L1 and FL teachers. Evidence therefore calls for a multilingual approach to writing pedagogy.  <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons Licence" style="border-width:0" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/80x15.png" /></a><br />This work is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License</a>.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute knowledge on children’s narrative writing from a pedagogical perspective. Through analyses of nine- to ten-year-old students’ narrative writing, aspects that are critical to discern in order to write narratives with a well-developed plot are formulated. The theoretical framework is narratology theories and Variation Theory. Narratology provides a conceptual framework for describing narrative writing, while Variation Theory offers a pedagogical perspective. A total of 80 narratives written by students have been analyzed, and five qualitatively different approaches to writing were seen. Narrative writing can be approached as describing events, solving a problem, creating action, making jokes and composing a narrative. A comparison between these approaches revealed five aspects that are critical for children to discern in order to develop the ability to write narratives: the discernment of a reader, the function of a narrative, the narrative structure, coherence, and duration. These aspects can be discerned in a more or less powerful way. The study contributes to the field by offering teachers guidance in what aspects are critical to address when teaching narrative writing in school.

Affect is an important predictor of writers’ performance. Though writing affect has been researched since the mid-1970s, few works have addressed the ways to motivate students to write and/or help them avoid demotivation. This paper suggests some guidelines that teachers can follow to help L2 students overcome negative writing affect. After briefly highlighting the aspects of negative writing affect and describing its causes, the paper provides five main guidelines for helping demotivated L2 students to write. These guidelines are: improving students’ linguistic knowledge, integrating technological tools in writing instruction, nurturing students’ positive beliefs about writing, optimizing teacher feedback, and orchestrating peer assessment activities. The first two pedagogical guidelines are concerned with fostering students’ positive writing affect indirectly through enabling them to overcome their composing problems and write in a supportive environment, whereas the last three focus on enhancing it directly by nurturing their positive beliefs about and attitudes towards writing. Each guideline is rationalized and described in detail.

At the comprehensive research university described in this study, some students taking a required, first-semester, composition course in the fall make great progress in their ability to draft and revise the curriculum’s major essays. Yet, they still fail the class. Many of these students are on their way to becoming practiced writers but require additional assistance to move beyond a definition of revision consisting solely of editing and proofreading strategies. To support such students, I created a voluntary, spring-semester, Composition I course foregrounding both lower- and higher-order revision practices in which students could continue to work on previous assignment drafts from fall. In a three-year, mixed methods, case study involving an experimental course-design model, students enrolling in a Composition I class focused on revision strategies demonstrated both positive revision-related drafting and course outcomes, according to findings. This article includes a description of the course’s framework and its assessment practices. The results of this study have implications for teaching revision in first-year composition.

This paper describes developmental writing paths within a Colombian major in Industrial Engineering. The accounts were created through retrospective descriptions of students' writing experiences collected by a qualitative survey and analyzing writing samples. The study shows that writing throughout the major embraces diverse functions (Writing to learn; Writing to apply content knowledge; Writing to research; Writing to communicate ideas), and traces diverse developmental paths (Writing for innovation; Lab writing; Writing for company analysis; Writing for conducting a senior thesis). This analysis also reveals that different types of problems (improving profits in companies or creating new devices) can be treated through different types of genres (research proposals in companies and projects of innovation), despite the fact that the same label (report) is being used by participants to group writing experiences. One of the writing functions in the major that seems overtly identified by the students is conducting a senior thesis. Since there are other writing functions present across the curriculum, further studies and pedagogical debates with faculty members are necessary to define what writing developmental paths are expected from the students and how many curriculum projects (that include explicit teaching on theories of disciplinary writing and genre knowledge) across the curriculum should be undertaken.

This exploratory case study investigated an experienced second language writing instructor's written feedback practice in an ESL freshman composition class. The purpose of the research was to explore and examine contextual factors and their impact on instructor written feedback practices in order to provide situated descriptions of relationships between written feedback practices and contextual factors. Data were collected from one experienced ESL writing instructor and one ESL writer in a variety of forms: surveys, interviews, a stimulated-recall task, classroom and instructor-student conference observations, instructional materials, and student written product. The study found that the instructor's decision-making in selecting specific feedback forms was guided by a number of written feedback practice principals in conjunction with other contextual factors such as the instructorperceived level of students' writing proficiency, the availability of writing conference, the nature of writing issues, students' writing performance in the previous writing assignments, lesson history, and knowledge about effective feedback practice. The study suggests L2 writing instructors' written feedback decisions are the product of different combinations of multiple-contextual factors and the nature of the written feedback practice principles is a task-specific manifestation of teacher cognition specifically configured for written feedback practice.

As more classes are moving from the brick and mortar environs to online instructional spaces, the experiences of future teachers with communication technologies in online contexts merit attention. The authors describe the study of an Online Writing Partnership to examine participants' beliefs about the efficacy of online instruction and the quality of student/teacher relationships that are built via online means. Findings indicated four contextual threads of particular salience to the participants of the study, threads which contributed to a general sense of frustration with the online context for teaching: (1) social presence between participants; (2) the nature of relationships established between teachers and students; (3) the role and authority of a teacher in those relationships; and (4) their preconceived expectations of learning environments. Preparing future teachers for experiences in online teaching and learning may require providing avenues for examining their beliefs about the work required to form effective student/teacher relationships in virtual spaces.

Writing about historical change involves advancing causal explanations that show how events impact people and how their emotions contribute to historical outcomes such as wars and revolutions. This study uses Martin and White's (2005) Appraisal framework to examine how the language of emotion (Affect), an overlooked feature of historical discourse, is used by L2 writers of an under-examined genre, the Factorial Explanation. The study was conducted in a content-based, politicalhistory course for 63 upper-intermediate learners of English at a Japanese university. Results show that while writers made extensive use of the Affect categories Positive Inclination and Negative Satisfaction, which were often realized as adjectives and verbs, nominal formulations for building cohesion were infrequent. Writers also tended to intensify Affect resources by construing feelings as static attributes rather than destabilizing forces of change. The paper makes recommendations for teaching genre-specific language features to aid learners in construing the emotion of history.

The teaching of composing strategies is acknowledged to be an important area in writing instruction and test preparation. This study presents a small set of data originating from a larger project which investigated the composing strategies reported by 30 international postgraduate students. These students were in their second year of university study and had all volunteered to attempt the TOEFL-iBT writing test. Immediately after completion of each task, they were interviewed about the way they had understood the requirements of the tasks and the processes and strategies they had used in order to complete them. All the students had successfully obtained entry to university and were functioning satisfactorily in their current areas of study, yet the scores they achieved in the TOEFL writing assessment showed considerable variation. Surprisingly, some were well below the benchmark for university entry. In order to investigate this, we revisited and reanalysed the interview data gathered from the three top and three bottom scorers, and examined similarities and differences in the way they approached and undertook the task. The high scorers' goals for task completion focused on the product as well as the process, and in contrast to the low scorers their monitoring strategies involved interaction with the emerging text. While we acknowledge that actual differences in language proficiency may have been partially responsible for the different scores, in this paper we explore the possible role of strategy choice, and we consider implications for test preparation teaching and writing instruction in general.

This case study uses an action research approach to the implementation of a systematic bilingual writing assessment that K-5 teachers administered over a two-year period in an inner-city public school with a two-way bilingual English-Spanish program. The study reflects the importance of developing an awareness of academic discourse over time, as teachers participated in a writing assessment project that included the administration of writing prompts and corresponding analysis of student writing through use of grade level rubrics, three times each year. The instrument was developed by the first author, a participant-observer who in the role of writing coordinator also led professional development workshops, and provided mentorship to teacher participants. The second researcher is an outside expert on bilingual writing who participated in the retrospective interview stage of the study. This paper will focus on insights from semi-structured interviews with teachers that reveal their current views on aspects of the writing assessment project. The questions prompted teachers to review the rubrics and associated assessment materials to garner insights about their participation in the assessment project. Thematic analysis of the interviews indicates that teachers enhanced their awareness of discourse structure and the writing process, as they incorporated the rubrics for several pedagogical purposes: more targeted whole group instruction, strategic and flexible grouping of students, and more deliberate selection of topics to support writers during individual conferences. Furthermore, teachers appreciated the ability to systematically track writing growth across the academic year, an option that had formerly been used solely for documentation of reading development in this setting. The influence of standards in providing goals for instructional outcomes is also discussed. Changes in the form of assessment are unlikely to enhance equity unless we change the ways in which assessments are used: from sorting mechanisms to diagnostic supports; from external monitors of performance to locally generated tools for inquiring deeply into teaching and learning, (Darling- Hammond, 1994: 7)

The author reports findings from two iterations of a formative experiment focusing on improving students' conventional and digital, multimodal arguments. The first iteration of this experiment occurred in a rural school district in the United Sates with an eleventh-grade English/language arts teacher, and the second iteration was implemented in the same school district, but in a different high school with both a ninth- and tenth-grade English/language arts teacher. The findings focus upon obstacles the teachers encountered while implementing an intervention that entailed elements of argument; digital, multimodal tools; and the writing process. These obstacles led the author to make six recommendations for the future professional development of rural teachers integrating digital, multimodal tools into conventional writing curriculum.

Collaborative writing is one of the twenty-first century writing competencies critical for college and career success. Technology-enhanced writing platforms, such as Google Docs, can serve as effective media for written collaboration. Although cloudbased tools such as Google Docs are increasingly used in secondary schools, little is known about how students collaboratively write in these environments, including how feedback sources and types of tasks affect collaborative writing patterns. This study examined the content of feedback and revision in 424 Google Docs written by 145 sixth grade students to understand the variations in feedback and revision patterns across key contextual factors: the source of feedback (i.e., teacher vs. peer) and assigned task type (i.e., argumentative, narrative, report). We conducted a qualitative content analysis of feedback and revision, followed by Chi-square and ANCOVA analyses. With regards to variations across feedback sources, we found that teacher feedback addressed more macro-level features (e.g., content, organization) whereas student feedback focused more on micro-level features (e.g., mechanics, conventions), and neither teacher nor peer feedback led to subsequent revisions. With regards to variations across task types, we found that among the three writing genres, the narrative genre had the greatest number of coauthors and feedback activities, and most of these activities consisted of affective feedback or direct edits. In contrast, in the report genre, the feedback activities tended to focus on content and organization, and the language functions of both feedback (e.g., advice, explanation) and revision (e.g., acknowledging, clarifying) were most evident in the report genre. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design and implementation of technology-based collaborative writing tasks in academic settings, as well as the limitations and directions for future studies.