The life of an adjunct is never slow. This essay looks into the professional and personal life of a community college teacher working at multiple colleges who wonders, like many others, how she will hold it all together and provide the quality of teaching that her students deserve.

This editorial offers a snapshot view of current trends in writing pedagogy, with the intention of raising awareness of some substantial changes taking place in methodologies, student populations, and teachers of writing. These changes, which are not revolutionary in nature but rather represent evolutionary trends, are nonetheless fairly dramatic in terms of (1) shifting the center of gravity of the field away from the United States and the teaching of writing to native speakers of English; (2) bifurcating the field into schools with different orientations to written texts and different methodologies for research and teaching; (3) disarticulating writing from reading; (4) raising issues of author identity and ownership of texts; and (5) potentially lowering the status and quality of the teaching of writing.

Multiple studies on the relationship between lexical diversity and holistic writing quality in a second language (L2) have consistently shown that a greater number of unique lexical items, compared to the total number of words, is associated with better quality writing. The findings of such studies indicate the importance of vocabulary to L2 writing. However, they provide little information in terms of what vocabulary L2 writers need to learn in order to improve their writing. Despite its limited application in the mid to late 1990s, the use of lexical frequency profiles has not been developed as a method for analyzing the vocabulary of L2 writers’ texts and providing insight as to the vocabulary needed for developing L2 writers. This study constructed two lexical frequency profiles of texts written by a homogeneous group of Spanish-speaking learners of English. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to determine the contribution of more and less frequent lexical items to the participants’ holistic scores. The results indicated that word types which occur less frequently in the English language contributed significantly to the participants’ holistic scores, despite the relatively low frequency with which they were used in the participants’ essays. These results suggest not only the utility of lexical frequency profiles in teaching and researching L2 writing, but also that L2 writers may benefit from instruction using frequency information. Pedagogical implications are discussed in terms of how L2 writing instructors can incorporate lexical frequency information into direct vocabulary instruction.

This article explores the prospects for internationalizing the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing, a degree that has gained considerable popularity in the United States in the past half century but has yet to gain much of a foothold in other countries. As part of this exploration, we describe the experiences of establishing the first low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in Asia at City University of Hong Kong, explaining the justification for setting up such a program with reference to the history of teaching creative writing and the current conditions for literary writing in English in Asia and globally. We also reflect upon the processes of planning, curriculum design, and administrative negotiation and that went into setting up the program and report on feedback from the first cohort of students. The experience of setting up this program is used as the basis for raising a number of more general issues regarding the teaching of creative writing in English in international contexts.

This article discusses creativity within the classroom with a focus on creative writing. First, it reviews concepts of creativity in the educational literature and a previous study on how science teachers fostered “small c” creativity in their classrooms. Small-c creativity values the kind of thinking that produces new ideas in learners but is not necessarily historically important to any field or domain. It can be argued that when educators help their students excel at thinking creatively every day, it assists them in more frequently producing creative products. Using this theoretical lens, an analytical study framework was developed from a review of the literature stating that teachers who foster small-c creativity: (1) support divergent thinking; (2) accept learning artifacts that are novel; (3) nurture collaboration in which individual kinds of creativity are supported; (4) provide choices in what is an acceptable response; and (5) include lesson guidelines that enhance learning and self-confidence. Findings of the science study were applied to the writing classroom, as five poet-teachers were interviewed regarding their beliefs about small-c creativity. The themes that emerged within the teacher interviews are discussed. The piece concludes with recommendations for writing teachers geared to help them foster small-c creativity in their classrooms.

As the number of pupils who are multilingual and multicultural continues to increase in the United States, finding ways to best support these learners’ writing has become a priority. This project explores the creation and use of third spaces that support writing in three diverse urban classroom contexts. Ethnographic case studies reveal the ways in which teachers created third spaces for multicultural and multilingual students’ voices to be heard (Bakhtin, 1986; Dyson, 2003). Findings suggest that co-constructing third spaces can contribute to a writing pedagogy that includes multilingual and multicultural student discourse(s) while expanding the social and practical purposes for writing. These findings have implications for teacher educators, researchers, and classroom teachers with regard to the power of co-constructed spaces where students’ lives and languages are used as the foundation for merging school and local networks.

Webheads in Action is an online community of practice (CoP) comprising teachers and learners who, for well over a decade now, have engaged one another in frequent collaboration serving to enhance the learning and knowledge of all concerned. This is achieved through constant exchange of ideas not only about teaching but also on the use of the Internet to provide opportunities for learning through appropriate application of freely available Web 2.0 tools in personal learning networks (PLNs). This article introduces Webheads as a CoP and provides specific examples of how participants scaffold each other’s teaching of writing and development of multiliteracies skills.

The case studies in this article represent the work of two elementary teachers who integrated their students’ identities into the literacy curriculum. Drawing on Cummins’ (2001) concept of identity investment, academic engagement, and multiliteracies theory, I discuss and analyze samples of students’ dual language writing and document the teaching practices that made these identity texts possible. Interview data from student participants and examples of their work illustrate the ways in which students re-imagine their identities by engaging with writing in both languages. The work of these students demonstrates the power that writing can have as a medium for students to express their identities. This study further shows that teaching writing through the use of personal narratives and cultural stories affords students opportunities to build their own cultural capital in relation to the expectations of academic writing.

This article focuses on student teachers of English in the Bachelor of Arts in Teaching English as a Second Language (BA TESL) program of the public state university of Oaxaca, Mexico. In Oaxaca, and Mexico at large, proficient English users are mainly from the upper socioeconomic classes. In general, the schools value Spanish and English to the exclusion of the prevailing Indigenous languages. Moreover, to be a legitimate English teacher, one is expected to look or act “American” or “gringo” and/or to have a “native-like” English accent. The Oaxacan student teachers are mainly from the lower or middle socioeconomic classes. They do not have “American” characteristics and lack a “native-like” English accent. Within this context is the present discussion situated. It demonstrates that the student teachers in two BA TESL classes utilize bilingual identity texts and dialogical ethnography as autobiographies and collages in order to co-create identities with which to assert their legitimacy as English teachers and multilingual speakers. The student teachers also validate their students’ multilingual identities, resist the “native speaker” versus “non-native speaker” dichotomy, confront the hegemony of Spanish over Indigenous languages, and attribute an international importance to their formation as English teachers. The bilingual identity texts and dialogic ethnography allow multilingual identity and intelligence to enter the TESL classroom and curriculum.

This is the second part of a two-part article on how Web 2.0 tools freely available afford so many opportunities for collaboration among writers in the context of social networking, creating the means for student writers to write purposefully for worldwide audiences. Part I set the stage by placing writing in the context of new views of literacy due in part to revoluntionary changes since the turn of the century in how content finds its way to the Internet. It explained how artifacts created with such tools are aggregated and harvested as learning objects with potential to promote and augment communication and collaboration online, and to promote writing by giving students interesting and meaningful ideas to write about, thus significantly changing how the teaching of writing might be re-envisaged in the digital age. Whereas Part I examined the production side of this dynamic, Part II explains how the Internet resolves the marketing side of the role once played by traditional publishing and how writers and audiences can navigate this seemingly chaotic preponderance of content online by tagging their work and using RSS and other aggregation tools to find one another's written work and carry on conversations about it, thus providing truly authentic motivation for their writing.

Like other kinds of work with a strong intellectual-reflective component, teaching is complex action. The wide range of skills and types of decisionmaking involved in this complex, high-level work classifies teachers as professionals not simply laborers As I have noted in research carried out with K-12 teachers in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, teachers have to manage a wide range of competing priorities in their work Like other teachers, writing teachers must handle a set of contrasting aims in classroom teaching, balancing the course-level and whole-class curriculum concerns of structure and predictability against the activity-level and individual-level concerns of teaching-learning process, creative response, and adaptation to circumstances and to the needs and interests of individual students. The teacher's balancing act is complicated by the need to factor in requirements and constraints imposed by administrators and governing bodies as to class size, workload, curriculum and texts, testing, grading, and record-keeping, and it is exacerbated by the extra time needed to handle the added burdens. It is further exacerbated by differences in what can be planned for in advance and what cannot and by differences in the teacher's goals, preferences, and ideals, on the one hand, and the reality of the teaching situation, on the other. Writing teachers' best-laid plans are often laid aside because of the constraints of their teaching situation, such as too-large class size or students whose linguistic or writing skills require remediation.

In this article, we describe an approach to teaching first-year composition that is built on a qualitative design for undergraduate research and writing. As writing instructors at a state teaching college, we see the need to move our students beyond the boundaries of expressivism, personal narrative, and argument and into the murkier, messier, and more critical territory of considering subjectivities, interpreting cultural texts and contexts, and, ultimately, coming to see the dynamic and dialogic nature of rhetorical situations and knowledge production. We have discovered that asking undergraduates to do field work as a way to enter the academic conversation allows them to shift from high school writing to college-level writing. Inviting them to delve into a primary research project of their own design grants them permission to construct their ownership, authority, and intellectual engagement of ideas. Case studies of the experiences of five student research writers illustrate the process through which, as ethnographers, students become actors in their own learning process.

Writing pedagogy and civic literacy can form an interactive, interdisciplinary partnership beneficial to students. Students learn to compare the classical rhetorical genres of epideictic, forensic, and deliberative rhetoric to modern ceremonial, judicial, and legislative rhetorical genres. Elements essential to writing pedagogy – ethos, logos, pathos, claims, warrants, and enthymemes – become meaningful as students engage in civic-themed reading and writing assignments designed for first-year composition. Writing pedagogy enriched with a civic literacy motif encourages students to practice writing to authentic audiences for genuine civic purposes.

This study employs ethnographic case study method to explore secondary English language learners’ experiences with content-area writing in a U.S. public school setting. Documentary evidence, interviews, and students’ written work comprise the data set. Data are interpreted through a sociocognitive theoretical lens to take into account contextual and individual cognitive factors that come into play in English language learners’ development of content-specific writing. Findings suggest that a combination of institutional factors (e.g. school program design, state regulations, and state assessment systems) in concert with teacher beliefs and expectations of English language learners impact the content-area writing instruction which English language learners receive. This study points to the need for continued investigation of state policies, school processes, and teacher beliefs and practices that may enhance the quality and breadth of writing English language learners experience as they move through secondary school.

Although response to student writing often consumes the majority of a writing instructor’s time and energy, studies of teachers’ philosophies and practices with regard to feedback have been relatively rare in the response literature. In the study described in this article, college writing instructors from six community colleges and two four-year universities in Northern California (N=129) were surveyed, and volunteers from this group (N=23) gave follow-up in-depth interviews. In addition, each interview participant provided 3-5 samples of student texts with their own written commentary. Based on the findings, our analysis focuses on two questions: 1. How do the participants (college-level writing instructors in Northern California) perceive response to student writing? 2. In what ways might the participants’ own practices be causing or adding to their frustrations? We found that although most of the participants value response and believe it is very important, they are often frustrated and dissatisfied with the task itself and with its apparent lack of impact on student progress. Our data analyses suggest some possible underlying explanations for these teachers’ complex attitudes toward response. The discussion concludes with suggestions of ways writing instructors can adapt or focus their response practices to increase the efficiency and quality of their feedback, to reduce frustration, and to increase satisfaction with this aspect of their teaching practice.

Writing is no easy task in any discipline and at any stage in a student’s course of university study. In addition, it brings with it the important concern of plagiarism. Obtaining student and teacher perceptions of the strategies students use to produce their assignments has been valuable in identifying and dealing with plagiarism. This article reports on a survey carried out at one English-medium university in Lebanon of 358 Arabic student views by discipline and year and 31 teacher views on the strategies students use to “improve” their written assignments. Results show that although students are aware of the prevalence of plagiarism in all disciplines and in all years of study, they perceive more incidences in the professional disciplines, at advanced levels, and in student use of strategies that give help to and gain help from their peers. Teachers indicated higher student use of all strategies and a greater extent of plagiarism than did the students. Recommendations in line with recent research emphasizing more positive methods are made for raising student awareness of ethical writing strategies, establishing common ground on what constitutes plagiarism, and implementing pedagogical practices and institutional policies that educate rather than penalize.

Over the past few decades, researchers interested in composition and second-language (L2) writing have increasingly begun to examine issues related to intentional and unintentional plagiarism, factors influencing plagiarism such as culture and language proficiency, and L2 writers’ textual borrowing practices. However, less attention has been paid to the instructional issues surrounding plagiarism. This article aims to add to the research on pedagogy specific to writing from sources by reporting on a survey conducted with 113 writing instructors working at universities, colleges, and intensive English language institutes in the Western United States. These instructors evaluated existing resources for teaching how to avoid plagiarism and shared ideas about the types of instructional materials they use or would like to use. Additionally, the article examines a case of one writing instructor utilizing resources related to textual borrowing when teaching a unit on summarizing as part of an academic writing course for L2 writers, and explores the decisions made in the process of implementing various resources in the class. Based on the results of the survey and the case study, recommendations are made for writing instructors and materials developers, along with suggestions for future research.

Professionals routinely ask colleagues for feedback on drafts of their written work, and the feedback they receive frequently includes suggestions for changes in wording. By convention, professionals are free to appropriate these suggestions without citation; the suggested words or phrases become, in effect, the author’s own in a transaction this essay terms a textual gift. In contrast, guidelines and policies on plagiarism for student writers are typically phrased in ways that would appear to forbid students from accepting textual gifts or to require that they use citation in doing so – both of which interfere with teaching students how to solicit and make use of feedback in a professional manner. Centered on a case from the author’s own experience, this essay explores the complexities of textual gifts in academic settings through a look at the language of institutional policies, handbooks on writing, and online guides to citation practices, as well as existing scholarship on plagiarism. The essay argues that new scholarship is needed to guide both instructors and institutions, and maps out some potential avenues for this work.

In the academy, approaches to handling plagiarism vary widely. Some – for example, the approaches of programs that use turnitin.com or similar software – favor detection and punishment. Others view instances of plagiarism as teaching moments, while still others argue that a culture-wide change in values is required for plagiarism to diminish. Our discussion examines these different perspectives, tracing them to their disciplinary or structural homes, before suggesting a practical pedagogy of plagiarism instruction that reconciles the differing approaches.

In response to difficulties in dealing with plagiarism and academic honesty, faculty and staff in a university-based American intensive English program (IEP) took specific measures to help international students understand these issues. The host institution’s policy on academic honesty, which was too difficult and nuanced for second language writers to understand, was replaced with a new policy written in simple language, making concepts and penalties easier to understand. Program-wide measures were implemented in stages to build summarizing and paraphrasing skills for students at all proficiency levels and to support their development as academic writers, and changes were made to the curriculum, incorporating writing from sources at an earlier stage, in scaffolded assignments. Teaching emphasis was shifted from after-the-fact punishment of plagiarism to proactively teaching about concepts of academic honesty and writing from sources. To assist with this, plagiarism detection services were repurposed and used as teaching tools for students instead of policing tools for instructors.

Writing courses increasingly incorporate Internet and online learning activities as part of the syllabus and teaching materials. How does this change our teaching practices, and which free and collaborative online tools can be most appropriately applied in online and blended writing courses? This is the first part of a two-part article focused on freely available Web 2.0 tools and how they can promote collaboration in the context of social networking. Part I places writing in the context of new views of literacy due in part to revolutionary changes since the turn of the century in how content finds its way to the Internet. Web 2.0 and cloud computing have made it possible for writers to publish not only prose but a range of other media online without having to pass through traditional gate-keepers, and tools and mechanisms have evolved for networking communities of like-minded writers online. Among the many impacts of this development is the possibility now for student writers to write purposefully for worldwide audiences. Part I examines the production side of this dynamic, while Part II (to appear in the first issue of this journal in 2011) explains how the Internet resolves the marketing side of the role once played by traditional publishing and how writers and audiences can navigate the seemingly chaotic preponderance of content available online to find one another’s material and carry on conversations about it, thus providing truly authentic motivation for their writing.

This article describes an approach to writing instruction that involves a combination of the genre approach and the process writing approach. The stages of the writing process that students often do not take time for, namely brainstorming, organizing ideas and drafting, are done as much as possible in the classroom. In preparation for this, students are introduced to models of the type of texts they will have to write, so that they can become familiar with the features that are typical of that text type (genre). These features form the basis of a checklist that will serve as a form for teacher feedback, which is given to the students at various stages of the writing process up to final revision. In addition, certain points are focused on in peer feedback. Throughout the entire process, students are encouraged to become aware of their progress through written reflection. We have found that such an approach, overseen and monitored by the teacher, leads students to writing more focused texts that conform to the genres to which they belong. For the purposes of this article, the text type of argumentative (opinion) essay was used as an example.

This study focuses on how teachers enrolled in a graduate level, online English Education course perceived formulaic or thesis-driven student writing, commonly associated with the traditional “five-paragraph essay.” One goal of this course, “Writing, Reading, and Teaching Creative Nonfiction,” was to engage teachers in reflecting about the uses of this “new” genre in their own classrooms. Living in several states, the participants included one science teacher, four Special Education teachers, and ten middle and secondary Language Arts teachers. We analyzed 12 separate prompts posted to the discussion board over a six-week period. Also, participants were required to post one “thread” into each discussion board, with follow-up comments to threads from at least two other participants. Approximately 75 out of a total of 800 coded comments dealt with formulaic writing. The following patterns of participants’ perceptions emerged from these comments: (1) student benefits of formulaic writing; (2) a hierarchical sequence for teaching writing; (3) obligations to teach formulaic writing; (4) resistance to formulaic writing; (5) the constraints of formulaic writing on students; and (6) the constraints of formulaic writing on teachers. Based on this study, we recommend that teachers engage in writing themselves which includes risk taking, modeling writing and significant revision for their students, and sharing models of writing; ensure that their students write in many forms and genres, including, but not limited to, the five-paragraph essay; develop realistic views of the expectations and obligations they face daily; and internalize effective writing practices. In the process of exploring the genre of creative nonfiction, teachers also had to grapple with old debates, as almost all of this study’s participants changed their views, discovering that the chains they had felt actually were not as tight as they had originally believed.

Previous research has shown that late immersion education in Hong Kong is not achieving the dual curriculum goals of content and second language learning which a late immersion curriculum can expect. This article presents a case study of writing in four late English immersion classes in Hong Kong, two in Biology and two in History, examining whether and how some of the teaching and learning processes with respect to writing support content and language learning. The study analyzed 285 samples of student writing using a writing analysis framework that reflects features of both content and language learning. The writing analysis, along with contextual data from teacher and student interviews and a teacher questionnaire, indicate that students demonstrate little content and language learning in their writing. The data suggest that the writing pedagogy adopted may partly explain the unsatisfactory learning outcomes. A major reason for adoption of the pedagogy seems to lie in the teachers’ and students’ views of the role of copying and memorization in writing and in learning, views which are characteristic of the Chinese educational context. Implications for writing teacher education within an immersion curriculum where the immersion language is from a different educational culture are discussed. Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3

The control of discourse functions, such as defining, contrasting, intensifying, and hedging among others, is an important skill in effective academic writing. Unlike the case with a typical writing textbook, where examples of discourse functions are invented or drawn for a variety of sources, the present work is based on an analysis of discourse functions from a single exemplary Doctoral thesis. The presentation demonstrates how a useful set of materials can be garnered from just one rich source. Additionally, it provides readers with descriptions and examples of eleven discourse functions identified through the analysis and discusses how this material has been implemented in the author’s advanced graduate writing class.

The purpose of this study was to explore the influence of professional development at a site of the National Writing Project (the Tampa Bay Area Writing Project), on student writing achievement. Student writing samples were collected at the beginning, middle, and end of the school year from 22 classes of students in grades 3-12. Statistical analysis, using Repeated Measures ANOVA, of a stratified random sample of papers from each class, revealed significant differences between students in classrooms of writing project trained teachers and students in classrooms of closely matched control group teachers, with students in treatment group classrooms demonstrating higher writing achievement at the end of the year. Effect sizes for the treatment group were consistently higher than those of the control group. Significant differences were not in evidence until April, two months after the state writing assessment, following which the teachers had changed their practices from a prior focus on test preparation. Results from statistical analysis and teacher interviews suggest that the pressures and requirements which educators and legislators believe will improve writing performance may actually impede teachers from doing their best work, and consequently, the students from achieving their best writing performance.

In setting forth the intended philosophy of the eSphere column, the column’s editor introduces what is possible in the teaching of writing in today’s technological climate as compared to the much less connected era when he started teaching several decades ago. At that time, computers were viewed as tools supporting behaviorist and algorithmic training philosophies, whereas current perspectives regard them more as adjuncts to constructivist and connectivist methodologies, and where writing is concerned, as a means of promoting authentic communication enhanced by social networking. Technology is now seen to facilitate most aspects of each step of the writing process. The eSphere column intends not only to document developments along these lines and to shed light on their impact on teaching writing, but to foretell them, following and extrapolating the trends and paradigm shifts as teaching practitioners utilize and adapt the affordances inherent in modern technologies. The column aims to encourage teachers to experiment and become familiar with the new tools and the most appropriate methodologies for their use. It is hoped that the eSphere column will become part of the conversations among teachers promoting informal learning with one another, which in subsequent stages can be applied with transformative effects in classrooms.

The teaching and learning of writing was examined in ten diverse K-12 schools in which all of the students in one or more classrooms had individual access to laptop computers. Substantial positive changes were observed in each stage of the writing process, including better access to information sources for planning and pre-writing; easier drafting of papers, especially for students with physical or cognitive disabilities that made handwriting laborious; more access to feedback, both from teachers, who could read printed papers much more quickly than handwritten ones, and, in some schools, by automated writing evaluation programs; more frequent and extensive revision; and greater opportunities to publish final papers or otherwise disseminate them to real audiences.

Most writing teachers make use of pens/pencils or computers as a tool to provide their students with written feedback. This article recommends a range of feedback modes for writing teachers, including (1) pen-and-paper, (2) insert comment/track change (giving comments by deleting and adding), and (3) insert audio (recording your voice). Advantages and disadvantages of each feedback mode, based on teacher’s observation as well as students’ preferences, are discussed to help writing teachers consider how different commenting modes might facilitate their feedback process.

This article describes an action research project conducted at two public schools in an urban center in the province of New Brunswick in eastern Canada. The project involved the development of and experimentation with a model for the instruction of writing (ÉCRI – écriture cohérente et raisonnée en immersion) at both the elementary and middle-school levels. Research questions focused on gaining insight into best practices for teaching writing through practitioner dialogue in professional learning communities (PLCs), classroom observation and videotaping, teacher reflections, and stimulated recall. The data gathered were analyzed to determine similarities and differences between the implementation of the model in elementary and middle school settings as well as second-language and first-language learning contexts. Results of the study demonstrate the applicability of this multi-phase model at both levels and in both learning environments and the adaptations necessary to meet the needs of learners in these contexts.

This is the inaugural issue of a journal, Writing & Pedagogy, that seeks to provide a new forum for discussion and dissemination of knowledge focused on both writing and the teaching of writing. It is innovative in being both international in scope and in spanning across all levels of education, from K-12 through doctoral level. The journal aims to provide information and stimulate conversations that can advance the theory and practice of writing pedagogy in first-and second-language environments by revealing similarities and differences in the practices and concerns regarding writing and the teaching of writing across different contexts and educational systems. The journal solicits submissions in the categories of essays, research reports, pedagogical reflections, discussions of technology, and book reviews. Although the primary focus is on the teaching of English writing within formal education, the journal welcomes articles on writing outside of English education, such as the teaching of writing in other languages, the writing needs of specific workplace contexts, and issues of a theoretical or practical nature involving the nature of writing or research on writing.

Advances in technology, such as the word-processor, have long supported the pedagogy of composition. However, in the Internet environment a variety of electronic tools and multimedia can further enhance best practices in teaching writing: the integration of reading and writing, recursive drafting, targeted grammar and vocabulary study, peer review, and publication.