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.

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.

Peer editing is a method used by English teachers to actively involve students in the writing process and to facilitate the development of the final draft of an essay. Controversy regarding the effectiveness of peer editing is prevalent for both instructors and students. The purpose of this paper is to share results of a classroom study that focuses on the effectiveness of peer editing practices in 2-year college composition classes. This review reveals the outcomes of several methods of peer editing, addresses both the difficulties and benefits of this process, and examines how to adapt the experience to meet the individual needs of each classroom environment. Peer Editing: A Single Review Peer Editing Worksheet Peer Editing Workshop: Groups of Three

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

Where Does Writing Curriculum Come From

This study examines the interplay between standards and personalization for linguistically diverse adolescents in a year-long Senior (12th grade) Exhibition project in a U.S. public high school. Focal students included a bilingual Mexican-origin immigrant, a transnational bilingual student of Mexican origin, and an English-only adolescent from California, all female. Qualitative data consisted of multiple drafts of each student’s 15–20 page research essay, interviews, writing conferences, and school-based standards documents. Analyses attended to how conceptions of personalization of learning in relation to a major research and writing assignment were operationalized in the experiences of three learners and the consequences of each approach for the student’s attention to standards in her inquiry and writing processes. Findings highlight the normative power of standards in promoting standardization within the current accountability paradigm and the potential of deep personalization to enhance learning around writing.

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.

This article picks up, literally, where another one leaves off: “Assessing Scholarly Multimedia: A Rhetorical Genre-Studies Approach” in Technical Communication Quarterly (Ball, 2012a). In that article, I describe how I have brought my editorial-mentoring work with Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, which exclusively publishes “born digital” media-rich scholarship, into undergraduate and graduate writing classes. This article describes how the process of editorial peer review translates into students’ peer review workshops in those same writing classes.

When introducing new technologies into the writing classroom, one runs the risk of producing “tool fatigue” in students, who can become overwhelmed by writing in different environments. With careful design and introduction of an assignment, however, instructors can help their classes avoid the pitfalls that come with innovative projects. Building from an experience with a failed assignment, this article outlines best practices for helping students and assignments succeed when writing with digital technologies.

Taking a practitioner focus, I present the need for and features of a new learner-centered discussion pedagogy. The article begins with an analysis of the dynamics and difficulties of facilitating and grading online threaded discussions in writing classes. It demonstrates how De Nigris and Witchel’s (2000) concepts of the “WRITE” and the “WRONG” can be integrated into Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956) to plan and create a discussion pool and tree that keeps students engaged as it moves them from lower to higher levels of learning. It further shows how the students’ progress on the cognitive scale and their timely, well thought out, and interactive participation can be encouraged and assessed. The discussion concludes with an examination of the advantages and feasibility of using the new, learner-centered discussion management pedagogy in graduate and undergraduate online and hybrid writing classes across universities and learning management systems.

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:

This study examines the effects of a one-to-one laptop program on the scientific writing of 5th and 6th grade students. A total of 538 native English-speaking, fluent English-proficient, and limited English-proficient students from four laptop schools and three control schools were prompted to write scientific essays at the start and end of the school year. Essays were examined along three dimensions: word use, text complexity, and writing quality. Overall, students who used laptops wrote longer, better structured essays that included more paragraphs and sentences. Students in the laptop condition also wrote higher quality prose that contained richer details and better addressed the prompts. Students in the laptop condition additionally showed greater gains from the beginning to the end of the year in the number of sentences per paragraph and the number of words per sentence than students in control classrooms. Finally, we found that although students’ writing varied as a function of proficiency in English, the effects of writing with laptops, in terms of both modality effects and gains associated with the treatment, were comparable for students with limited English proficiency, language minority students who were considered to have fluent English proficiency, and native English speakers. Thus, the benefits of including individual laptops in writing instruction may be enjoyed by elementary school students with varying levels of English proficiency.

Remixing Composition A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy Palmeri, Jason (2012) Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. pp. 194 ISBN: 9780809330898

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.

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.

Writing teachers are at the forefront in helping newcomers become members of the academic discourse community as writers of essays, reports, and dissertations. Newcomers may be native English-speaking, nontraditional students with limited writing skills or multilingual learners whose primary language is not English. The gap between their limited rhetorical practices and the norms of their professional disciplines concerns educational institutions seeking to facilitate the development of these students’ literacy skills. To lessen that gap and provide information on an underresearched population, this article reports on an exploratory case study of students at a Mexican university enrolled in a Chicano literature course taught in English. The data-based study adopts a situated literacy theoretical approach to learn about participants’ efforts to become successful multilingual writers. It is part of a larger ethnographic study of the rhetorical literacy practices of Mexican multilingual writers concerning the sociocultural context of writing instruction in the contemporary Mexican educational system. An understanding of students’ literacy practices in the local context can help researchers and teachers to better understand problems and issues regarding academic writing from participants’ perspectives.

Foreign Language Writing Instruction Principles and Practices Cimasko, Tony and Reichelt, Melinda (eds.) (2011) Anderson, South Carolina: Parlor Press. Pp vii–328. ISBN: 9781602352254

Writing trips overseas are recalled and proposed as a valuable source of inspiration for budding writers when they are thrown into a new context. The focus of discussion is on a program that takes a creative writing class abroad as part of the university curriculum.

This article integrates a research foundation in creativity with practical applications to writing pedagogy. A creativity assessment based upon the work of Torrance and Guilford and designed for diagnosing rather than predicting individual creative thinking strengths is presented along with tools and techniques for enhancing creative writing pedagogy and an analysis of student comments from an online Master’s program in Creativity and Innovation.

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.

Olivia Archibald's essay ("Representation, Ideology, and the Form of the Essay") arguing for a turn away from the formal, Baconian essay and towards the more creative and personalized Montaignian form of writing that was the original essai, and, in the most recent issue (volume 4.1), Douglas Heil's essay ("TV Writing and the Creative Writing Workshop: Shaping Practice across Disciplinary Boundaries") arguing for a meshing of the approaches of creative writing in English departments and scriptwriting pedagogy in mass communication. The current issue brings together the perspectives of creative writers, writing teachers, and creativity scholars to offer a novel examination of creativity for writing pedagogy. In combining reflections on the nature of

More than mere mathematical form, the fractal and other processes of chance can be used to help spur creative writing in new directions. From the inception of the I Ching, some form of constraint and the use of chance operations have been employed for centuries to free the creative impulse from overdetermination. This essay explores how one writer uses the flux of chaos both in the classroom and in his own writing, from collaborations to specifically designed writing exercises that help free the unconscious mind while still providing a sturdy architecture for perception.

Harriet Levin Millan introduces this special issue of Writing and Pedagogy: Creativity and Writing Pedagogy.

Taking a hybrid approach of research and narrative, theory and reflection, this essay utilizes yogic theory as a lens to discuss how students can negotiate one of the more challenging aspects of their research writing: freely setting out into the realm of creative, original research while negotiating genre-based constraints. I present research on genre and the “containment” of composition that highlights some of the past and current discussion about the potentially inhibiting heuristics that can shut down students’ constructions of agency and creativity in researched writing. Drawing upon research in contemplative pedagogy, essential texts of yogic philosophy, and images of the body in asana, I use the philosophy and language of yogic practice to propose a pedagogy that invites students to see their way toward an embodied practice of research, one that helps them to acknowledge and negotiate generic constraints, seek innovation, and accept uncertainty in their research-based writing.

Many writers begin as avid readers: reading can be the impetus and inspiration for their own work. In addition, many writers teach in undergraduate creative writing programs where they are confronted with students who do not share their relationship to reading or to language. This situation creates two problems: students aren’t engaged enough by language to make creative use of their reading and they lack a sense of authority that might allow them to be helpful critics of one another’s work. This essay explores and explains one strategy I have used in my undergraduate creative writing courses to address both issues. By asking my students to write creative responses to each other’s work, they learn to read more closely and carefully and also gain a sense of authority and competence in providing constructive criticism.

Writing in the Devil’s Tongue A History of English Composition in China Xiaoye You (2010) Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press. pp. 237 ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-2930-4. ISBN-10: 0-8093-2930-1

Based on the theory of dialogism (Bakhtin, 1981) and intertextuality (Kristeva, 1986), this study explores students’ and professors’ thoughts about formal citation practices based on their comments on whether certain words from source materials need to be acknowledged as others’ words in student writing. A total of 75 students and faculty members at a North American university were interviewed to comment on five examples of language re-use in some undergraduate writing. Participants’ comments focused on how they valued and distinguished (a) between words and ideas, (b) between words representing specialized concepts and words forming a grammatical structure, and (c) between specialized or newly coined words and words that have become widespread since their creation in a specific subject area. The study suggests the complexity of original expression and makes visible what individual students and professors are considering in their citation practices. The study further suggests that writing pedagogy needs to move from rule following to judgment and defense of judgment.

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.

This essay focuses on the implementation of a multimedia writing course and, in particular, a techno-literacy memoir project, which asked students (advanced undergraduates and graduate students) to use their creativity in choosing digital environments, such as podcasts, blogs, and wikis, for sharing their memories of gaining literacy through technology. What the students learned from this project was an ability to fluidly transition between print and digital literacy, along the way strengthening their ability to engage their audiences, and a recognition of their own cyborgian writing skills; indeed, they saw how various communication technologies were extensions of themselves. Through this project, they understood that they had been “cyborgs” since childhood (growing up with, for example, seemingly primitive Speak’N’Spells and Commodore 64s), and this realization helped them transition into a new repertoire of composing skills essential for 21st century student writers.

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.

Identity texts, literacy engagement, and multilingual classrooms: What do these terms mean and encompass, and how do they play out with today's highly diverse school-aged population, their teachers, and their families?The articles included in this volume of Writing & Pedagogy deal with the educational experiences of individuals from marginalized social groups, adding names and faces to individuals who teach and learn in multilingual classrooms.The latter term refers to classrooms that are multilingual by virtue of the large number of home languages spoken by students in these classrooms, home languages that are not the same as the language of instruction.The articles in this special issue illustrate how and why multilingual learners' literacy engagement, or personal investment in schooling, increases when teachers, peers, and their own parents view students' literacy productions positively.The term used for these productions or "texts" -be they written, spoken, visual, musical, or any combination thereof -is identity texts to emphasize that they express the learner's identity.taken together, these articles offer readers a global view of the relationship between providing spaces that honor marginalized groups' languages and cultures, of why marginalized individuals invest themselves in those spaces, and of how such investment influences children's subsequent academic achievement.The contributors draw on Cummins' (2001; this volume) academic language learning and literacy engagement frameworks to capture, untangle, and illustrate the dialectical interplay and

In this article, two case studies of Internet-based sister classes designed to foster second language learning are described with a focus on student writing. Writing is examined within the context of social constructivist and transformative orientations to pedagogy. In the context of these pedagogical orientations, writing is initially analyzed as communication within an environment that merges writing with speaking and also promotes changes in pedagogy. These pedagogical changes enable students’ writing to become a vehicle for generating new knowledge, creation of literature, and critical examination of social realities relevant to students’ lives.

Research indicates that when students’ identities are affirmed in micro-interactions between themselves and teachers, they are more likely to invest themselves academically (Cummins, 2001). Aboriginal students faced with pedagogical materials that negatively represent their culture are loath to invest themselves in their schooling. This reflection on practice describes the implementation of a dual language book project designed to produce positive identity texts to counter damaging representations of marginalized group members. The participant-authors were Aboriginal parents who wrote books intended for their preschool-aged children in their ancestral language and English. These parents created identity texts to reflect their children’s identities back to them in a positive light (Cummins, this volume) and, in so doing, they engaged in a form of “decolonized 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.

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.

No Child Left Behind has transformed education, including writing instruction. Teachers must remain true to effective writing practice in order to combat the rising trend of relying on standardized writing tests as the only measure of effective writing. When assessing writing, teachers should be major players in the assessment process, and a wide range of assessments should be used to accurately determine students’ writing abilities.

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.

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.

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