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

Multilingual writing is a challenging process that requires adjusting to academic and cultural demands. Studies of multilingual writers acknowledge the need for learners to self-regulate their cognition, affect, and actions as they write. Scholarship in educational psychology emphasizes socially regulated learning, suggesting that the regulation of learning is facilitated or hindered not only by the self but also by others. There is, therefore, a need to examine how developments in educational psychology and multilingual writing inform efforts to promote language learners’ writing skills. This article introduces a theoretical model of self- and socially regulated multilingual writing that can guide empirical research. The narrative literature review method was used to inform the design of the model. The review revealed that self- regulated writing by multilingual writers involves activating background knowledge and motivational beliefs, which then lead to decisions about strategies to employ to accomplish a writing task. The review also identified effective processes of socially regulated writing, including cognitive strategy instruction and formative assessment practices, particularly feedback. Finally, the review surfaced gaps in the literature that could be addressed, including how multilingual writers interpret writing tasks, manage their time and environment, deal with distractions, respond to feedback, seek help, and reflect on their successes and failures.

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

There is little research on teachers’ thoughts about giving feedback to young text writers. This study aims to contribute more knowledge about this by interviewing four primary school teachers about their thoughts about giving feedback on texts written by young writers. A second aim for this study is to contribute more knowledge about how writing medium might affect what potential teachers see for giving feedback on different aspects of a text. Finally, the study investigates which discourses of writing become visible when teachers talk about giving feedback on texts written by young writers. Findings indicate that overall teachers report that they give oral feedback to beginning writers, and they say it is important to have a positive focus. When teachers talk about what feedback they would have given examples of student texts, they have a tendency to focus on local aspects of the text. Interestingly, even in digital texts where some local aspects are occluded, there is a focus on local level. A review of the answers given by the teachers in this study indicates that most responses represent a skill discourse.

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

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

This study investigates the influences of interest and choice on the production of second language (L2) journal entries by first-year students (N = 88, 55 female, 33 male) at a university in western Japan. Between treatment groups and a neutral group, several aspects of writing were examined: total words, words per sentence, grammatical accuracy, and lexical sophistication (K1, K2, and AWL words). Further enquiry into students' preferred choice conditions was conducted with a post-treatment questionnaire. The results suggest that the provision of choice and interestingness of a topic affect some of the variables but not others. Pedagogical implications and suggested future research are discussed.

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

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

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.

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.