Important challenges faced by inexperienced academic writers include how to present an appropriate stance when commenting on their own research or on work by others, and how to successfully acknowledge and engage with readers’ needs, queries, and perspectives. This study investigated how well 22 new graduate writers from L1 and L2 backgrounds were able to convey stance and engagement in literature review assignments prepared for a graduate writing course. They claimed little or no prior knowledge in this skill area before taking part in 12–14 hours of instruction and practice where stance and engagement strategies were a core component before submitting reviews of approximately 1000 words. Analysis of post-instruction texts and students’ reflective comments revealed that students’ declarative knowledge had progressed, and that most were able to display an adequate or satisfactory level of proficiency in their writing. Based on these findings, I hypothesize a trajectory of stages of writers’ skill learning of stance and engagement strategies that acknowledges its complexities and the need for extensive practice to develop procedural skill. This proposed pathway makes explicit the fact that learning by novices is likely to progress incrementally, together with advances in their knowledge and self-confidence as academic writers and members of their disciplinary communities.

Peer feedback has long been an essential part of a process approach to writing in university EFL classrooms. This study examines how the affordances of peer feedback are shaped by students’ language choice. We interviewed 27 Chinese university students in an English writing course about their experiences giving and receiving oral peer feedback on an initial and revised draft of an essay. Semi-structured interviews were analyzed thematically and triangulated with stimulated recall, transcripts of peer review discussions, and content analyses of learners’ incorporation of feedback across essay drafts to better understand perceptions and actions following from language choice during oral peer review of their L2 writing. Findings show that students incorporated 56 percent of oral peer feedback instances when revising, and almost all of these occurred in students’ first language, Chinese. Participants described the L1 affordances of clarity, efficiency, and pragmatics as important considerations when giving oral feedback on peer writing. Through triangulation of oral peer feedback discussions, change across essay drafts, and student interviews, language choice is shown to be a supportive practice for L2 writers in oral peer feedback. In contrast to previous research that suggests that the L1 is used primarily for solving problems and less frequently for discussion of content, our findings show that students chose to use their L1 for peer review because of the perceived support offered for improving their writing – namely, clarity, efficiency, and pragmatics.

Recent decades have seen a shift regarding ideas of and approaches to literacy. One example is that the individual-psychological perspective focusing primarily on specific writing skills that used to be predominant has been extended and complemented by functional, social semiotic, and sociocultural perspectives where the interaction between the individual's use of language resources and the social, cultural, and historical contexts is in focus (e.g., Furthermore, issues of writing instruction and research have, in recent years, received far more attention than before, which can be noted by the publication of handbooks of writing research (MacArthur et al., 2016), writing development (Beard et al., 2009), writing instruction (Graham et al., 2019), and reviews of writing research

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.

Scandinavian writing research forms a relatively new field, with an increased number of studies conducted in the last two decades. In this qualitative synthesis review of 87 peer reviewed journal articles from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden published between 2010 and 2020, the aim was to outline the landscape of current educational writing research from the region. The sample included research articles published in both Scandinavian and international journals. Our analysis focused on the articles’ research approaches and main themes regarding the object of investigation. The main themes identified were Writing Instruction, Writing Assessment, and Students’ Text. We found a predominance of studies conducted in the context of language arts/first language (L1) education, concerning either disciplinary or general aspects of writing. We also found a predominance of approaches based on either sociocultural or social semiotic theory. Furthermore, a majority of the reviewed studies were explorative and small-scale, and, for the Writing Assessment studies in particular, directed at the secondary stages of school. The results suggest a call for future studies focusing on writing interventions and studies deploying a wide range of methodological approaches, as well as studies based on inter-Scandinavian collaborations across Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

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

Reviews of: Very like a whale: The assessment of writing programs Edward M. White, Norbert Elliot, and Irvin Peckham (2015) ISBN-13: 978-0-87421-985-2. Pp. 202. Assessing and improving student writing in college Barbara E. Walvoord (2014) ISBN-13: 978-1-118-55736-5. Pp. xiii + 119.

Book review.

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.

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.

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.