The ‘Learner-Driven Feedback’ (LDF) procedure is innovative in its combination of approaches to feedback provision in second/foreign language writing instruction which a) respond to learners’ individual queries and b) employ digital modes of delivery ([anonymised ] 2016). In LDF, formative feedback is given by the teacher, but the learners indicate on what aspects of their writing and in what mode they would like to receive feedback. In this study, LDF was used with 36 postgraduate students of an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) class at a university in Germany. The presented analysis of survey data highlights high levels of receptivity to LDF and reveals students’ perceptions of the affordances of different digital delivery modes for improving their writing. While feedback in the form of margin comment bubbles was perceived to be helpful to foster improvement in general language accuracy, students preferred emailed or audio-recorded feedback for the improvement of their writing related academic skills. The potential applicability of LDF for EAP and other writing instruction contexts is discussed based on these findings.

The use of technology for collaborative writing and the delivery of electronic corrective feedback is becoming widespread in educational settings. However, to date, little research has focused on comparing the suitability of different Web 2.0 applications for technology-enhanced peer feedback. This study explores three free-to-use applications: Google Docs, the Sakai Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), and the Sakai Wiki. The study reports on the practicalities and peer reviewers’ experiences of these applications and, most importantly, compares the electronic feedback comments across applications. Seventy-eight English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students at an Austrian university participated in this counterbalanced, repeated-measures study. Over a ten-week period, participants wrote three draft essays, reviewed a peer’s unique draft using each application, and received peer feedback on their own drafts using each application. Comments were coded for the quantity, area, nature, location, and type of feedback. An entrance questionnaire elicited background information, and an exit questionnaire elicited quantitative and qualitative insights into the participants’ comparative experiences. The findings show that each application supports the exchange of peer feedback and that the applications’ feedback modes influence the reviewers’ comment foci. This study should help teachers make more informed decisions about which application is most appropriate for their desired peer feedback learning objectives.

This article addresses the challenge of writing instruction in a standards-based environment where students are accountable for mastering different genres and text types. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), now adopted by the majority of states in the USA, provide exemplars of successful papers in the different disciplines, but offer no guidelines for teaching, particularly to inexperienced writers or English language learners. Since a text in any genre can be developed in a limitless variety of ways, students need a methodology for analyzing effective texts, and for developing their own. This article proposes that focusing on grammatical choice offers an entry point into understanding the craft of Explanations and Arguments. To illustrate, four samples of high school writing are analyzed from the published CCSS exemplars: two Explanations and two Arguments, all with very different purposes and development. The analysis demonstrates the central role that grammar plays in constructing these differences. Specifically, the analysis focuses on information management across noun groups for the Explanations, and on verb choice and modality for the Arguments. Drawing on functional grammar insights, this article proposes a pathway for students from the analysis of model texts to the effective construction of their own.

There has been little scholarly work looking at the use of creative writing pedagogy within non-creative writing courses. However, ‘Outside the box: Incorporating high stakes creative writing assignments into non-major literature courses, a case study’ demonstrates promising findings when incorporating high stakes creative writing assignments into the curriculum for core English literature courses. This article gives an overview of the Progressive history of ‘creative’ writing in the academy and then outlines contemporary sources that reference the burgeoning field of Creative Writing Studies and how creative writing pedagogy may be used more broadly in classrooms in a variety of disciplines. Then the case study details the assignments and experience of teaching a high stakes creative assignment in a non-major literature course at an undergraduate liberal arts institution. Using 25 representative student responses from among 50 total students over multiple semesters, the article concludes by asserting the findings that the inclusion of a high stakes creative assignment – in this case an original short story that is workshopped by peers and then revised – results in students who note increased confidence and creativity, and who state making connections between the relevance of writing instruction and workshopping to their lives outside of the classroom. While further, more formalized study would be beneficial on this topic, this study provides a useful perspective not just to teachers within the English department but also has ramifications for interdisciplinary scholarship.

A number of studies have used interviews to find out L2 learners’ perceptions of different feedback practices. Usually, learners who have been interviewed have experienced a number of different feedback practices. The purpose of the present study is to investigate learner revision practices and perceptions of peer and teacher feedback after having received feedback from only one source. In this study, learners received either teacher feedback alone or only peer feedback for one year. Twelve students were then interviewed to investigate their revision practices and perceptions of both peer and teacher feedback. The narrative analysis of the interview data showed that participants were very concerned about ‘correcting’ their drafts. Students in both groups had similar levels of comprehension of feedback; however, those in the peer feedback group were more forthcoming about asking their peers when they did not understand. Students in the teacher feedback group felt that they did not have enough time between drafts for the revisions they wanted to make. It was also found that students in the peer feedback group seemed to benefit more from reading their peers’ writing than from receiving peer feedback.

Fanfiction is a work of fantasy in which fans write stories based on original books, movies, TV series, and other cultural and artistic forms of expression. This study looks into fanfiction dedicated to the popular TV series Breaking Bad. In particular, it examines how fans construct the (spoken) dialogues of their (written) stories. The article explores the pedagogic value of using fanfiction in educational contexts, focusing on the analysis, creation, and enactment of stories inspired by TV series and movies that feature a combination of narration and ‘written speech’. The article also offers practical recommendations for classroom and online activities that support the development of skills and understandings related to writing and orality. The effort of representing speech in a written form (i.e., writing dialogues and descriptions of conversations) can help students reflect, with the aid of the teacher, on the distinctiveness and specificity of written and spoken communication. By comparing, contrasting, and critiquing audiovisual and written texts (e.g., the episodes of a TV series and the transcriptions of its dialogues), and by creating their own dialogue-rich stories, students can improve their understanding of the idiosyncrasies of writing and orality across modes, thus advancing their literacy and critical skills as creative producers, not just consumers, of popular culture and media.

Literacy education, especially writing in US secondary schools, suffers for its detachment from the breadth of social purposes for which literacy is required and in which literacy is developed. Complex forms of cultural communication are best learned in conjunction with creative, productive, action sanctioned through authentic social connections. Orality offers clues to the development of practice-oriented literacy education that can help contextualize emerging interest in disciplinary literacy within broader cultural worlds that give us practical reasons and rules. This paper presents four cases of practice-oriented communication, which encompass a broad set of communities of practice. They offer multiple avenues for thinking about the role of practice and oral communication in teaching writing as a twenty-first-century literacy. Discussion of the cases suggests opportunities for instruction in situated, contingent, and emergent twenty-first-century literacies.

The identity of ‘the English writing teacher’ is increasingly important in Asia. Influenced by disciplinary and professional discourses, English teachers in this region tend to develop a monolingual orientation that leads their students towards native speaker norms. However, globalization requires a fluid, less-bounded perspective on nation, culture, and language, that is, a more multilingual orientation to English teaching. This essay argues that an historical perspective on teaching second language (L2) writing in Asia has the potential to reinvent writing teacher identity by challenging teachers’ monolingual assumptions. I will first review historical accounts of teaching L2 writing in Asia, showing that this history is multilingual and transnational. Next, drawing on historical examples related to the teaching of English writing in China, I demonstrate that Chinese students and teachers have struggled with a monolingual ideology endorsed by the state ever since English became a school subject. Recent scholarship in applied linguistics and literacy studies has suggested ways to embrace multilingualism in teaching and research. Coupled with such scholarship, historical knowledge may encourage writing teachers to construct a multilingual, transnational identity by designing teaching materials, writing tasks, and pedagogical techniques in a multilingual framework.

In this article, I seek to reflexively examine my practice as an EAP teacher given the task of teaching academic writing to a group of Japanese graduate school students studying for a Master of Arts in English Language Education at a private university in Tokyo. Drawing on Lillis’ (2003) notions of ‘critique’ and ‘design’, my article covers the following areas: (1) student conceptualizations of ‘good’ academic writing; (2) the need for a socially-situated approach to academic writing that takes into account writers’ identities and subjectivities; (3) the manner in which such identities and subjectivities are not static or pre-existent, but are discursively constructed and subject to individual negotiation and agency; (4) student insights into how such negotiated identities and subjectivities can be reified and enacted in written work; (5) the way students can move into a ‘design’ mode through imagining and asserting new possibilities for meaning making. Throughout, I am concerned with how teachers can best help students appreciate the value of discovering the discursive and dynamic nature of their identity-borne narratives. I also argue that such a realization can provide students with a richer understanding of their ontological positioning as writers vis-à-vis writing as a socially-situated meaning making activity.

Icy Lee introduces Writing and Pedagogy 8.3 (2016)

From the perspective of sociocultural theories, individual writing conferences between a teacher and a student offer an optimal dialogical framework for negotiating and adjusting oral corrective feedback (CF) to L2 students’ developmental levels with the aim of enhancing students’ ability to self-correct. While some empirical findings support the use of negotiated CF, little research has examined the extent to which teachers negotiate CF with their students or the way they change their CF strategies in naturalistic writing conferences, especially in the Chinese EFL context. The current case study used and adapted regulatory scales for CF developed by Aljaafreh and Lantolf (1994) and by Erlam, Ellis, and Batstone (2013), to analyse teacher talk addressing linguistic errors in two writing conferences at a Chinese university. The two teachers were found to use very different approaches to providing CF. One teacher often began with implicit CF and gradually tailored her subsequent CF after eliciting the student’s responses. Contrastingly, the other teacher often diagnosed errors and supplied correction without inviting input from the student. The findings suggested that teachers’ beliefs about feedback, their goals of having writing conferences, availability of time resources, and the curriculum focus could impact their choice to negotiate CF with students.

Given the growing number of international teaching assistants (ITAs) on US campuses, ITAs have become critical members of US academic communities. Research related to ITAs’ experiences in US classrooms reveals certain challenges that ITAs encounter as instructors in this new educational context. These challenges can be instructional, social, linguistic, or cultural in nature. In response to the need to provide incoming ITAs with both ongoing institutional and personal support, this pilot action research study investigates the impact of the use of reflective dialogic blogs on the ITAs in terms of their development of teaching expertise, cross-cultural awareness, and language skills at the completion of the ITA training course offered at a southwestern US university. The study involved a group of ITAs in online interactions via blogs with the ITA-training course instructor for the duration of one academic semester. Data collection focused on the content of the ITAs’ writing and their perceptions of the effectiveness of reflective dialogic blogs in regard to their development as instructors. The results suggest that more attempts to use tools such as reflective dialogic blogs should be made in the future. The article also suggests possible modifications for the use of reflective dialogic blogs with prospective students.

The Pecha Kucha talk is an effective way to encourage the composition process; to promote the use of effective visuals to explain and engage; and to distribute the expertise in the classroom away from the teacher as the central expert and to the students. In this paper, we describe and give an example of what is called a Pecha Kucha (Japanese for ‘chit chat’). When examined within the frameworks of theorists in the areas of composition, pedagogy, and literacy, this emerging presentation genre is promising for both composer and audience. With this in mind, we first discuss ways that the creator of the Pecha Kucha may benefit from the specific composition space. We then share how this composition exercise is an effective teaching tool. Next, we show ways that this presentation style maximizes learning with image and speech coordination and skills of analysis and synthesis. Then we introduce how Pecha Kuchas give students the opportunity to teach and to work with technological tools in authentic ways. Finally, implications for future practice in developing compositions using oral delivery with visuals are discussed.

A series of focus groups was conducted to obtain and compare attitudes held by undergraduate university students and educators about the nature of academic writing. Analysis of comments found misalignment of assumptions about the linguistic demands on students. Such misalignments were evident not only between groups but also within each population. A follow-up study involved two students recording impressions in journals about their own awareness of language use and demands, to trace any metalinguistic gains from participating in the focus groups. Data from this qualitative study are discussed in terms of the benefits of metalinguistic awareness and the need to uncover assumptions about what academic writing is in order to yield more informed teaching and deeper learning.

This paper introduces five linked resources and demonstrates, with a focus on Business, Economics and Engineering, their use in a novel genre-instantiation approach to teaching academic writing. The resources centre on the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus. They are: (1) published research literature that investigates the student assignment genres and registers; (2) descriptions of the contents of the corpus; (3) the BAWE corpus itself, which can be freely searched by teachers and learners; (4) online teaching materials based on the above; and (5) lesson plans from EAP teachers who use these materials in their teaching of presessional and in-sessional academic English. The genre instantiation approach to teaching academic writing builds on two central principles: the identification of key genres for target discipline-levels, and the exemplification of these through instances of successful student writing. This enables teachers to develop programmes that raise genre awareness, where learners can engage with instances from across specific topics, courses, levels and disciplines. The genre-instantiation approach is illustrated here with specific reference to Business Case Studies, Economics Essays and Engineering Methodology Recounts.

Writing in a second language, especially using new technologies, is fraught with difficulties for most students. There are two main challenges, firstly, how can students move from their understanding of the mechanical aspects of texts (good sentence structure and appropriate lexis) to deal with issues of how to construct texts that go beyond the basics, for instance drawing upon multiple modes of expression, and secondly, how can students use their knowledge about new technologies to help them create texts? This paper examines the collaborative processes English for Science students go through when constructing a scientific text for a popular audience, here, a digital video scientific documentary. Undergraduate students had to work in groups to write the text for a digital story based on an experiment they had undertaken. As part of the process these students had to prepare a script which was then recorded, either speaking directly to the camera, or as a voice over onto the video to complement their video images. Based on examples from the students’ generated data: Facebook, WhatsApp posts and scripts, we see that the end product was rich and informative. It is maintained that a collaborative approach using new technologies to writing such popular scientific texts engages the students with their work and that, when given the opportunity, they learn from each other as much as from their teacher.

Producing publishable quality research articles is a difficult task for novice scholarly writers. Particularly challenging is writing the Discussion/Conclusion section, which requires taking evaluative and interpretive stances on obtained results and substantiating claims regarding the worth of the scholarly contribution of the article to scientific knowledge. Conforming to the expectations of the target disciplinary community adds another dimension to the challenge. Corpus-based genre analysis can foster postgraduate writing instruction by providing insightful descriptions of rhetorical patterns and variation in disciplinary discourse. This paper introduces a pedagogically-oriented cross-disciplinary model of moves and steps devised through top-down corpus analysis. The model was applied to pedagogical materials and tasks designed to enhance genre and corpus-based teaching of Discussion/ Conclusions with an explicit focus on rhetorical conventions.

This article outlines a student-centered, ‘hands-on’ approach to the teaching of writing at university level through first discovering and then creating the features of written texts in three dimensions: microtextual (lexico-grammar), macrotextual (rhetoric), and extratextual (context). The ‘3-D’ approach has been designed for novice writers, offering a practical, step-by-step procedure to prepare them to write in specific disciplines and for specific purposes. Though usable with other audiences, the sample material included here is especially appropriate for second-language writers and will be of particular interest to students of science. While the approach is consistent with Systemic-Functional and ESP orientations to text, as contrasted with most ESP pedagogy – especially that geared to students in sciences – the 3-D approach gives particular attention to affect, writer–reader interaction, and shared context. The approach, which starts from analysis of texts and then moves to writing of texts, is first described and then illustrated using several short popular science texts about insects and birds. These texts exemplify lexico-grammatical and rhetorical features of scientific texts while also illustrating other purposes which a writer may seek to fulfill as well as the underlying assumptions and author biases that might exist even in texts which appear to be purely descriptive or ‘objective’. The texts and analyses provided are intended for classroom use to train students in the approach, supplemented by a step by step guide for students to follow. Through the activities provided for the sample texts, students develop awareness of the properties of texts and how these can be discovered through analysis and then written into their own texts.

New standards for writing provide the opportunity to rethink definitions of what writing is in schools. While traditional assessment methods align with many of the new standards and offer an important tool for gauging the success of some elements of writing, they often neglect other elements. In traditional assessment, the elements that are quantifiable become those that are valued. Teachers can promote consideration of other elements, those intangibles that change a text from an assignment to be completed into a powerful communicative act, by intervening in the prewriting or planning stage of the writing process. This article discusses one possible form of intervention in which the teacher has a conversation with a student that centers on the student’s investment of interest in her/his topic and helps the student plan a paper that will make a unique contribution and not just fulfill a task. By using a prewriting rubric to focus the conversation, the teacher is able to track student progress in understanding and enacting this important component of writing.

Although many second language writing classes use a process approach, anecdotal evidence suggests that assessment of writing in such classes often still focuses on the written product alone. This assessment practice continues despite specialists having recommended that both process and product be assessed. This study compares second-year university students in Japan who were assessed on feedback processes and product with others assessed on product alone in terms of perceptions of the feedback received. Perceptions were determined through a post-treatment questionnaire. Neither the assessment of the use of teacher feedback in revisions nor the assessment of the quality and quantity of peer feedback was found to have a clear benefit in terms of students’ perceptions of the feedback received. This finding suggests the need for further research to confirm whether the assessment of both process and product is worth the considerable time investment required.

Information management of discourse – the ability of a writer to use linguistic forms to organize and present information in a written text – is a key component of second language (L2) ability models in the language assessment literature (e.g., Canale & Swain, 1980; Weigle, 2002), but Purpura’s (2004) language ability model developed specifically for assessment purposes is the only one that considers it to be part of the ability to use grammar accurately and meaningfully when producing a text in an L2. The current study investigated whether L2 academic writing teachers consider information management of discourse as an assessment criterion when assessing grammar in L2 academic texts. Fourteen students in an academic English as a second language writing course at an English-medium university in Canada and their teacher participated in this case study. Students’ essay exam scripts were collected, and the Theme-Rheme progression (TRP) patterns and links (Daneš, 1974) as well as the distribution of new and given information (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) in these essays were analyzed. Pearson correlation coefficients between the teacher-assigned grammar grade and the results from the TRP and information distribution analyses were calculated. The findings indicate that information management of discourse indeed forms part of the assessment criteria for grammar in academic writing for the teacher in this study. The implications of this finding for L2 writing pedagogy are discussed.

Screencasting is a technology that enables the user to record screen activity on video while also capturing audio or video narration of the lecturer demonstrating that screen activity. This technology has improved over the years, and has now become streamlined enough to be integrated easily in popular learning platforms like Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and Moodle. The technology’s high usability factor and the varieties of screencasting software now available as open source makes screencasting appealing to writing instructors, not only as a means to improve teaching, but also as a tool for students to create and engage with multimedia texts that facilitate the acquisition of contemporary literacy skills. In the United States, the National Council of Teachers of English proposes that 21st century definitions of literacy must, among other things, include the ability of writers and readers to analyze, create, and interact with multimedia texts and to gain proficiency with the use of modern technologies. I argue that screencasting is a practical and creative technology that can be used for a variety of purposes: to address 21st century literacy requirements in writing classes, to improve teaching effectiveness in both online and “flipped classroom” learning, and to enhance the instructor’s social presence in online learning environments. I give examples from my own teaching experience using Camtasia and ScreenFlow software, as well as review some popular applications of screencasting technology currently in use in academic environments.

This article is based on the idea that there is latent storytelling already in proposals. It explores the various ways in which storytelling functions as a pedagogical model of teaching the writing of proposals in business and technical writing courses. The central premise is that stories, like proposals, are forms of discourse that place events sequentially from beginning to end with meaningful and graspable connections in between. Stories take (identified) audiences into account by being selective of events that are carefully rearranged and described through composites of scenarios and characters. This article explores those storytelling patterns in theory and in practice. It aims to enhance the perspective of teaching proposal writing by calling attention to a seemingly inconsequential or unrelated notion – storytelling.

This article outlines strategies that have been put in place in a nursing degree program with the aim of increasing student confidence regarding academic writing in the field of nursing. It introduces an embedded co-teaching approach and outlines how this approach is enacted in practice. Strategies are introduced, including class sessions, a three part multi-stage assignment, and the feedback systems being used. Issues identified in the literature with regard to academic writing in undergraduate study are discussed, and a case is put forward for the continued use of embedded discipline-specific classes for nursing and other students in higher education.

This essay is concerned with contemporary writing center and composition studies and focuses on including fiction in both the theory and practice of writing centers and classrooms. Stemming from contemporary theorists such as Andrea Lunsford and Min-zhan Lu, my work incorporates Sapphire’s (1996) novel, Push, so as to highlight the unique perspectives fiction can give as to how we approach teaching and tutoring students. Offering fiction as impacting both theory and practice – in its potential inclusion within tutor-training syllabi, for instance – I assert that fiction is an untapped resource for writing center and pedagogical studies that is often overlooked or cast aside. By also observing race and education theorists such as Laura Greenfield, Karen Rowan, and Victor Villanueva, my analysis of Sapphire’s work makes evident the potential for fiction to more thoroughly inform our approaches towards past, present, and future writing center and pedagogical studies.

Genre analysis has become an important tool for teaching writing across the disciplines to non-native English-speaking (EL2) and native English-speaking (EL1) graduate students alike. Since the pressing needs of EL2 graduate students have meant that educators often teach them in separate classes, and since genre-based research into teaching higher-level writing has been largely generated in fields such as English for Academic Purposes, we have an insufficient understanding of whether this instructional mode plays out similarly in EL1 and EL2 classrooms. Launching a genre-based course on writing research articles in parallel sections for EL1 and EL2 graduate students provided an opportunity to address this knowledge shortfall. This article qualitatively examines the different classroom behaviors observed in each version of the course when a common curriculum was used and specifically explores three key themes: initial receptivity, nature of student engagement, and overall assessment. Our study shows that although EL2 and EL1 learners have similar needs, the obstacles to their benefitting from genre-based instruction are different; EL2 students must learn to identify themselves as needing writing support that transcends linguistic matters, while EL1 students must learn to identify themselves as needing writing support despite their linguistic competence. Providing the same mode of instruction can benefit both populations as long as educators are sensitive to the specific challenges each population presents in the classroom. The insights gained contribute to the scholarship on genre-based teaching and offer ways of better meeting the needs of EL1 and EL2 students alike.

This article presents research findings from a professional development project initiated by one rural Illinois primary school to improve writing instruction in 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms. During the 2010–11 academic year, the school partnered with a private university to provide customized, year-long professional development that integrated preparation for the state writing assessment and a writing process approach. Simultaneously, a study was conducted to identify and describe teacher thinking and practices related to writing instruction during participation in the project. Data were collected through a pre/post teacher survey and written teacher reflections. Participating teachers indicated 15 improvements in their thinking and practices related to writing instruction. However, confidence in their students’ likelihood to perform well on the state writing assessment decreased during the project, and changes in thinking and practices varied from teacher to teacher, possibly due to varying levels of teacher readiness to change.

Students currently attending colleges and universities in the United States were in elementary school when writing workshop was first introduced as a teaching method. In this article an undergraduate honors student and a literacy teacher educator critically reflect on the student’s 2nd grade experiences with writing workshop and identify the features of this teaching method that led to her development of a writer’s identity. Through autobiography and retrospective analysis of primary data, they argue that tone, the basic elements of writing workshop of time, choice, and process; a literature-rich environment; and a community focus contributed to the development of a writerly identity.

The importance of digital literacy becomes increasingly apparent as we move farther into the 21st century. As the digital world becomes an increasing part of our everyday lives and an important aspect of many professions, the need to instruct students on how to publish their thoughts digitally is ever more apparent. As technological proficiency becomes increasingly expected in many employment settings, it is vital that students are able to make their thoughts clear electronically. Blogging in a safe environment is one way that educators may blend young students’ writing skill, their awareness of the purposes for writing, and digital-age technology. This article describes the work of one primary grade teacher at an urban high-needs school’s use of blogging in conjunction with writing workshop. Use of blogging to publish students’ writing increased students’ writing engagement, improved their knowledge of how to navigate and use computers, and increased their understanding of the potential benefits and dangers of writing digitally.

PhotoVoice is a community and participatory action research method based in grassroots empowerment education, critical feminist theory, and documentary photography which enables people with little money, power, or status to communicate needed changes to policymakers. Prior to this in-school research project, studies of PhotoVoice in the United States focused on adolescents in out-of-school educational settings (Chio and Fandt, 2007; Strack, Magill, and McDonagh, 2004; Wilson et al., 2007; Zenkov and Harmon, 2009; The Viewfinder Project, 2010). In this study, teacher participants found that English language learners and resistant writers were motivated to identify the impact of personal and political realities in their lives in order to question existing structures and to imagine alternative futures. The use of PhotoVoice in K–12 classrooms offers an accessible, motivating, and technologically rich entry point and an authentic forum for emerging young writers to share their photos, their writing, and their stories with others to create powerful visual representations to transform existing conditions in their communities.

Common Core Standards involve an increased emphasis on non-fiction reading and writing. Across grade bands, students are expected to read and compose a variety of non-fiction texts as well as develop age appropriate research skills. With this in mind, the author worked with a 1st grade teacher to use Jerry Pallotta’s Who Would Win? series in a class non-fiction writing project that was standards-based. The class consisted of a wide range of ability levels, so the author and teacher frequently used cooperative learning strategies throughout the entire process. Using the series as a model, the students were guided through the writing process, from pre-writing to publishing, with the culminating activity being a meeting with Pallotta where students presented him with their class authored Who Would Win? book. As a result of the writing unit, students were able to experience non-fiction texts on a variety of levels and craft a quality piece of literature that was authentic, relevant, and personal.

Guest editor's introduction

This reflection on effective writing practice is the result of a university-school partnership focused on collaboratively investigating the work of a successful 5th grade writing teacher. The co-authors collectively present the work of Mrs. Hutchison, a veteran teacher who worked in a predominately low-income school with a high percentage of students labeled English language learners. Mrs. Hutchison’s class was a space where each student was both a learner and a teacher and most students developed a great interest and love of writing. This reflective piece presents data documenting Mrs. Hutchison’s success as well as a collaborative reflection on her work intended to provide a glimpse into Mrs. Hutchison’s commitments and practices, and how these resulted in students’ learning and productive writing activity and achievement. In so doing, we hope to provide some models of effective practices that others may wish to adapt or investigate further.

Many writers find that freewriting is crucial to their work, and it has been around long enough to be part of the common language within composition studies. Freewriting is defined as the sustained, often timed, approach to writing-without-stopping. What is “free” is the direction the writer may take and the freeing of ideas through writing. Despite the recognized benefits of freewriting, it has seldom been studied in secondary classrooms, and teachers may be reluctant to implement it on a regular basis. This article presents case studies to examine what, if any, benefits are found when daily freewriting is implemented. Two junior high school classrooms were studied for a semester. Data included student freewriting samples, interviews with students, pre and post surveys on students’ views of writing, and observational notes. In addition to the qualitative data, a collection of quantitative data (fluency rates and pre and post writing apprehension scores) created a mixed-method study. Findings include many benefits from regular freewriting. The classroom routine provided a sense of peace in a very busy day; freewriting helped develop confidence and comfort with writing; student writing quality showed flexibility in thought and style of writing depending on topic; and students engaged with course content. Several implications are made for teachers, including the importance of carefully establishing the routine and expectation that students will write during this time. In addition, teacher modeling of the freewriting showed a positive influence on the students’ writing experiences.

The growing disparity in the cultural and linguistic backgrounds in U.S. classrooms of teachers and students suggests that there is a critical need for teachers to be knowledgeable and prepared to effectively teach this diverse population of students. In a longitudinal research study conducted in two 3rd grade classrooms in the Southeastern region of the United States, researchers examined the impact of a sustained and generative model of professional development on teachers’ sense of agency and their understandings of what it means to be a writing teacher with multilingual students (Flint, Kurumada, Fisher, and Zisook, 2011; Flint, Zisook, and Fisher, 2011). In this article, we add to this empirical work by focusing on pedagogical practices that strengthened the writing curriculum and teachers’ understandings of the children they teach. The pedagogical shifts, which happened over an extended period of time, were marked by two distinct and interconnected processes: (a) teachers began to understand and adopt the discourse of writing workshop and then use it as a mediator of students’ thought to promote student voice; and (b) teachers gradually released their control over students’ authorial voice and agency for writing. These processes enabled students to share more about their lives, beliefs, and interests, and for their teachers to recognize the uniqueness and perspective each child brought to the classroom.

This study examined the impact of different forms of feedback on the writing of a group of 82 adolescent students in secondary English classes. During a 6-week intervention, students were randomly assigned to one of three feedback groups: peer feedback on pen-and-paper drafts, teacher feedback delivered electronically through a course management system, and automated feedback generated through computer-based writing evaluation software. Pre- and post-measures of student writing quality, length, and correctness were analyzed, and survey data explored student perceptions of their experiences. Findings indicate that all students, regardless of which form of feedback they received, wrote longer essays and scored higher on holistic ratings at post test than they did at pretest. Neither language status nor group assignment had a greater or lesser impact on performance on length or holistic quality. However, differences between feedback groups spiked on the proximal measure that examined mastery of particular aspects of the genre being taught. Both peer feedback and teacher feedback delivered electronically had a statistically significant impact on student performance in the genre of open-ended response. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for future research and instruction in the secondary context.

Studies of peer review in ESL classes typically focus on student attitudes and experiences. In contrast, teachers’ perceptions of and experiences with peer review have not been the focus of much scholarly attention. This case study explored one experienced teacher’s perspectives on peer review sessions in ESL classes. The study was conducted in the English language institute at a large urban university in the southeastern United States between Fall 2009 and Summer 2010. Shelley, the focal ESL instructor, was selected purposefully for her extensive use of peer review sessions in academic reading and writing classes. Classroom observations and interviews were subsequently analyzed using direct interpretation method (Creswell, 2007). The findings of the study shed light on the process of peer review sessions and their advantages and disadvantages from an experienced teacher’s point of view. Triangulation of the data, thick description of the context and procedures, a detailed discussion of the results, and the researchers’ reflexivity contribute to the reliability and validity of the findings. With its focus on the teacher’s perspective and experiences, the findings of this study may inform educators about the process of peer review and its pros and cons in ESL classes.

The current study reports on the “rhetoric revision log,” which was developed to help second language writing students track their progress in improving rhetoric-related issues in their writing (such as organization and topic development). Sixty-six English as a second language (ESL) students were divided into one control and two treatment groups. Students in the two treatment groups used the rhetoric revision log to keep a record of teacher written feedback in several rhetoric-related areas throughout the course of one semester. The two treatment groups differed in that in one the students used only the log (log-only), while in the other (log + conference) students also participated in structured writing conferences in which the teacher discussed the rhetoric revision log with the students. Results revealed that both treatment groups improved more in their overall writing ability than the control group. Moreover, students in the log + conference group were more likely than the other two groups to improve in rhetoric-related writing features over the course of the semester. These findings suggest that using the rhetoric revision log helped students improve not only rhetoric-related aspects of their writing, but also their overall writing ability.

As research on corrective feedback targeting linguistic accuracy in second language (L2) writing expands in scope and quality, we continue to gain insights about the effects of feedback on L2 writers. Nevertheless, comparatively little research has focused on the teachers themselves – those who make the pedagogical decisions about the use of feedback in the classroom. Thus, we have sought to better understand the variables that may shape practitioners’ choices about feedback targeting linguistic accuracy. The purpose of this study was to analyze learner, teacher, and situational variables that may influence correct feedback choices in the L2 classroom. Data were collected by means of an electronic survey distributed to over 1000 ESL/EFL writing teachers in 69 different nations. In addition to investigating the entire data set, we examined those practitioners who provide the most and least feedback targeting linguistic accuracy. We analyzed variables such as learner age, proficiency, purposes for language learning, the ESL/EFL context, and type of institution, as well as the teachers’ L1, level of education, academic background, years of experience, and professional responsibilities. A number of systematic differences between groups were observed. Explanations for these findings are explored and suggestions are given for future research. Teacher attention to linguistic accuracy versus rhetorical instruction

Much of the research on teacher response to student writing has focused on how teachers can best help their students improve their writing and, concomitantly, on the reactions teachers’ responses evoke in their students. What is largely absent as an object of study in this research is the teacher’s experience of the responding process and the effects which alternative methods of response have on the teacher’s role in the classroom. This article describes my attempts as a writing teacher to separate grading student writing from responding to student writing. Based on my observations during a modest pilot study, I suggest that the act of grading lies at the heart of the negative reactions teachers have when they respond to student writing and that eliminating grading has positive effects on the teacher’s response process, on classroom instruction, and on how teachers conceptualize their classroom role.

As Natural User Interfaces (NUIs) grow increasingly common, this article investigates what they might do with/for writing and say about the teaching of writing. Specifically, I review three NUI writing projects, critically examining the rhetorical features of the projects and investigating the relationship between NUIs and Graphic User Interfaces (GUIs). Ultimately, I argue that NUIs are not “natural” interfaces but are as historically and socially grounded as GUIs; even so, NUIs hold the potential to invigorate a critical and activities based pedagogy, placing new focus on socially constructed meanings, material interactions, and embodied performances.

The pedagogical technique of “extreme puppet theater” is posited as a collaborative and novel learning tool for motivating students to study texts by creating new ones. Examples are provided of how this approach has worked in university courses in literature, composition, and creative writing. By extension, extreme puppet theater can be applied to other subjects, at all levels of academia, in order to offer an effective and engaging alternative to traditional teaching conventions.

Multimodal Composing in Classrooms Learning and Teaching for the Digital World. Edited by Suzanne M. Miller and Mary B. McVee (2012) New York and London, Routledge. pp. 161 ISBN: 978-415-89747-1

This article is addressed to those interested in integrating social media, as a collaborative component, into Business and Technical Writing courses. Educators find themselves under the false impression that digital natives’ familiarity with these tools will result in their embracing them as part and parcel of coursework. The reality is that today’s students need help in moving beyond the familiar applications of these virtual spaces in their personal lives and toward their uses as dynamic components of the educational experience. Relearning Facebook to do more than “friending” people, “liking” activities, and announcing one’s status involves an emphasis on the professional role of this developing medium of communication. These professional applications, therefore, must be fully integrated into the academic experience. Most Business and Technical Writing courses at Rutgers University culminate with each student submitting a research proposal, developed throughout the course of a 15-week semester. The justification for the plan of action in each proposal is based upon scholarly research. In our Collaborative Writing Practices course, the students develop their proposals in teams and are instructed to use various social networking platforms to communicate with each other, as well as with their instructor, as a supplement to the face-to-face classroom environment. In addition, each researched plan is required to advance a solution that utilizes social media. Our “triangulated” approach to instruction immerses students into social networking and helps them understand that, to be successful, collaborative writing must occur on a variety of levels. We also integrate social media into several of our online classes, where it is used to replace key elements of face-to-face courses, such as formal presentations. We have found that implementing a social media project instead of the traditional PowerPoint presentation encourages a greater level of interaction and participation among students.

Greetings from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, where a central part of our mission is to anticipate and create model classrooms and pedagogies that might inspire universities around the world as they reinvent themselves in the face of technological innovation. We have been particularly inspired by our colleague, Professor Richard Miller, who is at the forefront of research and practice on how digital technologies have come to bear on the future of education. In his article, “The Coming Apocalypse,” Miller (2010) explains that the “paradigm shift” occurring in higher education, once based solely on the scholarly production of copyrighted print documents, confronts the realm of resources and information open to us on the Web. He writes:

While composition has become more open to issues of world Englishes and more aware of how English writing is taught and learned in countries other than the United States, one of the issues that needs further investigation concerns the influence of increasingly powerful and accessible technologies for translation on the teaching of English writing in places where English is not the language of local communication. The most widely available technology for translation, Google Translate, can quickly convert large amounts of text from one language to another, though it does it with varying amounts of accuracy. Despite its sometimes egregious mistakes, however, it is fast becoming a tool not only for people who want to read online texts written in another language, but for composing texts. How students of English as a foreign language (EFL) might use translation technologies such as Google’s translation function when composing is an important question because it stretches (perhaps uncomfortably) the boundaries of what it means to “write in English.” How should EFL writing teachers integrate the use of such technologies into their teaching? In this article, I will explore the context of Google translation use in one country where English is not a language of local communication. Finally, I will suggest ways to use this phenomenon to rethink the notion of what it means to teach EFL writing in an age of increasingly sophisticated machine translation.

The use of online course or learning management system (LMS) tools proliferates as writing instruction grows online along with administrative concerns to improve teaching efficiencies and program assessment. While many institutions use the template feature in LMS systems (e.g. Blackboard Vista) to generate a location for teacher resources, some institutions are using LMS tools to standardize course content, delivery, and pedagogy to varying degrees. However, digital literacy issues that affect both teachers and students can negatively impact teaching and learning with LMS tools, especially in Web-based settings. It is important to understand how such tools may or may not be used effectively in standardizing writing pedagogy, particularly how designers’ unfamiliarity with course content and their own and their students’ inexperience with the tools can negatively affect pedagogy and learning with such tools. I describe a specific example of problems encountered within an extreme form of standardization in a Web-based writing course delivered via WebCT/Vista, identify implications of such standardization, and suggest considerations that educators should be aware of in their efforts to standardize writing pedagogy through LMS tools.

In this article, I extend the academic conversation about writing and identity by investigating the experiences of one adult student negotiating the transition between professional and academic communities and identities. Drawing on a framework articulated by Ivanic (1998), I examine the interaction between the writer’s autobiographical self, the socially available possibilities for self-hood, and the discoursal self the student constructs in a single instance of academic writing. I argue that the primary writerly identity this student constructs in his text is a workplace or professional identity and show how this identity is not entirely coherent but reflects the process of identity transition the student was facing on the job at the time. I use this case study to draw attention to the negotiations some adult students pursuing postsecondary study make, especially those with well-established workplace identities, as they face the challenge of composing new identities in academic settings. I further suggest that the challenge of identity negotiation is one faced by all writers, not just adults, and that this is a challenge we must account for in our teaching and research.