This reflective article discusses lessons learned when Reading Landscapes & Writing Nature, an annual collaboration between a National Writing Project site and Weir Farm National Historical Park, migrated online in 2020 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The organizations have used critical pedagogies of place (Gruenewald, 2003) since 2017 to guide teacher writing workshops, and reimagined the professional development in digital spaces with multimodal literacies (Kinloch, 2009; Kress, 2003). This including 360 photospheres and Padlet as tools to expand educators’ understandings of literacy, wellness, and place.

The spring and summer of 2020 were rife with tension emanating from hate speech, racial violence, and a global health pandemic. Educators deliberated over the uncertainties of equitable access to learning, healthcare, and wellbeing. This article will describe how the Red Mountain Writing Project created a third space (Gutierrez, 2008) grounded by Critical Race Theory (CRT) in education (Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001; Solorzano & Yosso, 2001) and Historically Responsive Literacy (Muhammad, 2020) to center the lives of teachers, their experiences, and their stories during a tumultuous time. The authors will share how they built and maintained a supportive virtual space for teachers to critically examine and reflect on their lived experiences, social awareness, sense of agency, and anti-racist teaching and writing practices. Now, after more than two years, teacher-writer communities are especially needed – third spaces where teachers from diverse backgrounds can hold space together and engage in writing to heal, find joy, empathize, and amplify their experiential knowledges.

This online antiracist program for children as young as 3 and their parents/caregivers took place in June of 2020 early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Driven by a desire to build change in opposition to racism and unite families during a time of quarantine and isolation, the program fuses family literacy practices to create space for discussions surrounding race, racism, anti-racism and alliance. The model of the program uses children’s literature to make difficult topics accessible to young children, and provides literacy activities which are engaging, age appropriate, and adaptable to materials at hand, interests, abilities and attention spans of each child. This success of this program demonstrates the power of the model to engage with young children and issues of social justice.

This piece reflects on a secondary teacher’s attempt to empower her students during the Covid Pandemic crisis schooling response in the United States. In this article, the students engage with their hybrid identities and lived experiences to build skills and criticality toward cultivating the changemaker within themselves. Selections of student testimony and the reflexive practices of the teacher are centered in the explanation of a project rooted in Culturally and Historically Responsive literacy.

In this reflective article, a case study, we draw upon scholarship on a critical friendship (Schuck & Russell, 2005; Silva, 2003) that grew in 2020 as we worked to assist one another in creating NWP writing programs for teachers and youth. At the heart of our professional collaboration was our desire to maintain and cultivate community engagement (Deans, Roswell, & Wurr, 2010; Preece, 2017), while advancing racial literacies in digital spaces (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021) and as we worked with a framework for instructional equity (Muhammad, 2020). Weekly meetings led us to using Padlet for 189 hours of professional development, 9 programs with 511 youth, and 7 courses with 320 students. Padlet became a location for curation, especially as we worked to promote diverse, inclusive children’s and young adult texts as models for classroom teacher and student writers.

Beyond Fitting In: Rethinking First Generation Writing and Literacy Education Kelly Ritter (Ed.). Modern Language Association, New York (2023). 352 pp. $49.00, ISBN: 978-1-60329-603-8 (pbk) $105.00, ISBN: 978-1-60329-602-1 (hbk)

While much of the work on increasing diversity of U.S. schools has focused on urban and suburban contexts, rural schools and communities have seen an influx of multilingual immigrant and migrant students. Using qualitative data collected in English classrooms at two different rural high schools as part of a larger study, this article profiles two rural ELA teachers who stood out as unique supporters of their multilingual students’ literacy development. These profiles are contextualized in broader debates in writing studies about valuating language diversity and avoiding form-based approaches in instruction. In concluding comments, the author explores how these teachers don’t neatly fit categorizations of effective writing teachers and argues that writing researchers need to work across increasingly polarized divides to help make rural schools more inclusive spaces for linguistically diverse students.

Bullshit, as defined by Frankfurt (2005, p. 10), is language that is “disconnected from a concern for the truth.” Much scholarship shows that bullshit is a prominent feature in organizations that is difficult, if not impossible, to get rid of (e.g., McCarthy et al., 2020; Penny, 2010). Bullshit, by definition and by cultural practice, seems antithetical to business writing orthodoxy. As Thill and Bovée (2020) suggest in a representative textbook, communication should be clear and ethical. However, Spicer (2020) codifies bullshit as a social practice whose outcomes are not always dire. Well-crafted bullshit benefits its users, allowing them to “fit into a speech community, get things done in day-to-day interaction and bolster their image and identity” (Spicer, 2020, p. 20). Contrasting with business writing’s abstinence-only bullshit stance, this suggests that successful writers must adapt to their organization’s speech act practices. In this article, we argue that students must be taught about bullshit. After describing bullshit and its role in organizations, we show how business writing could incorporate a critically informed approach to bullshit in undergraduate courses, internship preparation courses, and other curricular instances in which students work directly with organizations. While bullshitting should not be outright encouraged, continued ignorance will do nothing to solve its associated problems. Promoting bullshit literacy, however, could both minimize bullshit’s harms and maximize its benefits. We close by describing how this approach could foster critical thinking skills, promote more seamless adaptation to organizational cultures and communication practices, and perhaps even improve mental health outcomes.

Concerns about teaching structured authoring, which is the use of software in technical writing to allow automatic textual reuse and reassembly, have been woven into the debate about what role technologies should play in preparing technical writing students for ‘real world’ needs since the late 1990s (see Brumberger & Laurer, 2015; Carnegie & Crane, 2019; Kimball, 2015; Rainey et al., 2018). Vee (2017) and others have argued that fundamental aspects of writing software code, many of which parallel structured authoring, are now required literacies. Indeed, as Gentle (2017) demonstrates, the difference between those writing code and those writing structured authoring continues to shrink. Helping to develop technical writers to understand this overlap remains a significant challenge. This article suggests that this challenge might be met by using an open-source interactive fiction authoring platform called Twine, which provides many of the building blocks of structured authoring while teaching fundamental aspects of coding. However, this approach is not without its perils. Through analyzing the findings of a two-year study, this article identifies potential avenues for success as well as potential pitfalls to be mindfully considered.

In this article, we present a novel framework for identifying young students’ writing development in the first years of primary school (age 6–8 years). It was developed to analyse a large number of student texts (n = 803), all in the format of digitised books, as part of the large-scale Danish research project titled Teaching Platform for Developing and Automatically Tracking Early Stage Literacy Skills (ATEL, 2018–2023). In this project, based on a text-oriented model of writing, we aim to gain insights into less considered dimensions of emergent writing. Specifically, we consider how young students construct sentences and expand their meaning-making repertoires in this regard, as well as how they tie a whole text together and begin to express interpersonal meaning. In developing the framework, we took inspiration from both formal and functional linguistic approaches to young students’ writing development and constructed a comprehensive framework to examine the first steps into ways of communicating through writing in school. Furthermore, through a theory-and data-driven process, we developed the framework to suit emergent writing in the educational and language context in Denmark. In addition to presenting the framework in this article, we discuss its limitations and potentials for research and practice.

This paper aims to validate scales for the early development of writing proficiency based on a framework used to linguistically describe multiple dimensions of writing development in 6–9 year-old Danish-speaking students and to lay the statistical foundation for empirically describing proficiency levels in emergent writers. The analysis is based on the Rasch model and was conducted on texts (n = 803) written by Year 0–2 students using the computer app WriteReader. The paper introduces both the model and the theory behind it, including the rationale for using this model, and it presents the main analytical steps taken and decisions made in the study, which is part of the large-scale Danish research project entitled Teaching Platform for Developing and Automatically Tracking Early Stage Literacy Skills (ATEL, 2018–2023). The results show that it is possible to identify detailed levels of early writing development in four dimensions: 1) text construction, 2) sentence construction, 3) verbals, and 4) modifiers.

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

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.

Research conceptualization is challenging for doctoral and master’s writers, particularly multilingual students engaging in thesis writing or writing for publication. In doctoral and master’s student writing, research conceptualization appears in three genres: problem statements, research proposals and introduction sections or chapters. Swale’s (1990; Feak and Swales, 2011) CARS model is most often used to analyze conceptualization in these genres. While very useful as an analytical tool, the CARS model does not translate well to pedagogy. I argue that Merriam’s (2009) problem/purpose statement and questions (PPS&Q) format provides a flexible and accessible technique to make the process of research conceptualization visible and to help students focus their research throughout the writing process. Navigating problem formulation and gap spotting requires highly complex literacies and Merriam’s method allows students to begin simply and build complexity. While genre visibility provides a way for doctoral and master’s students to access high-level literacies demands, it can also be formulaic and constraining and needs to be taught with critical awareness.

While social work educators have explored strategies to improve literacy development among their students, many educators continue to strive for a better integration of effective reading and writing skills. This article presents the findings of a survey that used qualitative research methods to assess the outcomes of a doctorate in social work program that employed a specialist in composition. Doctorate in social work students reported on the skill of ‘close reading’ as it related to their own writing, practice, university teaching, and field supervision. Data analysis reveals that these students had not previously learned the close reading skills necessary for strong writing skills. This article extends support for a full integration of close reading as a way to improve writing, clinical mental health practice, and critical thinking skills.

The writing that older adults, retirees, and the elderly – what might be referred to as the aging stage of life (Conrad, 1992) – remains under-examined in writing studies. This research project explores the literate practices of five retirees who write on a regular basis in order to understand how they organize themselves and their lives for writing across lifeworlds. A theoretical framework from a lifespan perspective (Bazerman et al., 2017) serves as the departure point for a grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006; Saldana, 2009) analysis of artifacts that emerged from a series of retrospective interview protocols. These protocols were based on previous work in sponsors of literacy (Brandt, 2001) and chronotopic lamination (Prior and Shipka, 2003). Analysis of these interviews and documents reveals a core category of stabilizing that retirees engage in. Writers stabilize their work in a given moment to continue making sense of a chain of literate acts, which enables them to carry forward complex literate lives. These findings suggest that retirees write their way into new contexts shaped by their pre-retirement histories. The manner in which these subjects went about this work suggests that context is an important and complicated concept when examined through a lifespan perspective.

This qualitative study examines academic support practices and students’ experiences and perspectives in a graduate nursing education program that has, for many years, emphasized research and writing by requiring aspiring nurse practitioners to pursue publication in peer-reviewed clinical research journals. In collaboration with faculty, practitioner researchers from the university’s postsecondary learning center developed and facilitated group workshops and provided students with individual consultations on research processes and manuscript development. The researchers wrote field notes and researcher memos, administered workshop evaluations, and interviewed seven participants to better understand students’ writer identities and whether writing for the discipline of nursing with the support of peers, faculty, and learning instructors led to any changes in both their individual and collective sense of disciplinary identity. More broadly, this study interrogated the role of a postsecondary learning center employing an academic literacies pedagogical approach (Lea and Street, 1998; Lillis and Scott, 2007) in working with faculty to support students’ writing for a specific discipline. Findings suggest that graduate nursing students felt anxiety and uncertainty about claiming disciplinary expertise and competence as writers. This affective experience made it difficult for students to align their understandings of nursing as a discipline, rooted in their field experiences as professionals, with a more academic conceptualization that they believed to be represented by the research and writing practices required for the assignment. By engaging with the learning center as a third space (Gutiérrez, 2008), the students explored these challenges and experimented with writing practices, directions for their research, and the conceptualization of their profession as they modified their understanding of what was possible for scholarly writing and research in nursing as a discipline and what they could contribute individually as emerging scholars. This study has implications for teaching academic writing practices in nursing contexts, as well as other academic disciplines and for forming generative collaborations between postsecondary learning centers and subject experts.

The term resistance has been an evolving concept in literacy and composition studies. While much has been studied in terms of student resistance in high schools, first-year composition classrooms, and in university writing centers, little is known about how resistance occurs in afterschool tutoring programs between volunteer writing tutors and their tutees. Using an ethnographic case study approach, this paper examines how three adult volunteer writing tutors made sense of resistance in working with their adolescent tutees in an urban tutoring program. The findings showed that tutor attitudes, values, and reactions shaped their experience of resistance in a variety of ways including a) misreading tutee signals of engagement; b) masking expectations of cultural and linguistic compliance within a discourse of resistance; and c) embracing resistance as a bridge to tutor growth. The author uses these findings to inform current conceptions of student resistance and compliance and to provide implication for volunteer tutor training.

Two and a half million adolescent girls have experienced some form of sexual violence in India; significantly, they make up a quarter of all rape cases, despite being a small percentage of the population (Raj and McDougal, 2014). Parents and girls’ fears about safety contributes to their high dropout rates within Indian education, but thus far there has been little research on this topic. Focusing on underprivileged adolescent girls at an afterschool site in Mumbai, India, this qualitative study investigates how within this landscape of sexual violence, writing serves as a medium to name, resist, and transform it. Specifically, we scrutinize the articulation of resistance which attempts to contest social norms, cultural conventions, and other forms of everyday hegemony. We examine data extracts from essays written by three adolescent girls participating in the afterschool program as part of a pilot study that took place in December 2016. The analysis of these extracts illuminates how the girls, through their writing, articulate their vulnerabilities about their own and others’ personal safety. Furthermore, it reveals how it is connected to their ability to access education. Moreover, it highlights the ways in which the girls resist parental and other socio-cultural pressures. Finally, the analysis sheds light on the complex and powerful ways in which the girls assert their independence, demand autonomy over their lives, and exercise agency. Ultimately, this investigation offers a path forward for Indian educators to reimagine girls’ education in light of girls’ safety issues, using writing as a space to articulate a literacy of resistance and hope.

This paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of Halliday’s Sydney School genrebased approach in teaching Chinese written composition to South Asian ethnic minority students in Hong Kong. Chinese language, with its heightened status in Hong Kong, holds a key for South Asians with low socio-economic status to obtain upward mobility (Shum, Gao, Tsung, and Ki, 2011). However, South Asian ethnic minority students, as a disadvantaged group of second language learners, lack sufficient parental and institutional support in Chinese language learning. The genrebased pedagogy derived from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) was applied in this study to improve Chinese language performance of South Asian ethnic minority students for a better chance to participate in mainstream society. The SFL approach is primarily concerned with language choice in social situations and has been widely applied in sociolinguistics (Hyland, 2007, 2012). Its latest model in language teaching methodology, the ’Reading to Learn, Learning to Write’ (R2L) pedagogy, is a genre-based teaching strategy which is designed to guide students to experience different levels of language through extensive classroom reading and writing activities with selected texts. The current study is intended to extend the approach to teaching and learning Chinese as a second language. The employment of genre-based pedagogy aims to support South Asian students with their learning of Chinese written composition in the senior secondary curriculum. The Chinese teachers involved were first provided with appropriate training in the genre-based approach to language teaching focusing on the genres of Narration and Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use theand Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use the and Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use the genre-based teaching approach, by means of pre- and post-tests after and before genre instruction. Text analysis based on SFL was then employed to analyze the students’ written composition in both pre- and post-tests in order to understand the effectiveness of the genre-based pedagogy in teaching Chinese as a second language. The finding shows that the students at the high, medium, and low levels improved both in the construction of schematic structure and the variation of lexicogrammatical choices from the whole-text, sentence and word levels respectively in their writing performance. Hopefully, the findings will help curriculum development and teacher education for teaching Chinese as a second language to non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong and beyond.

This article identifies how a cohort of preservice teachers educated during the No Child Left Behind Era thought about the teaching of writing when they entered a secondary English Language Arts (ELA) teacher preparation program. Most participants shared the beliefs that: (1) writing was primarily the demonstration of specific skills, often on a standardized test; (2) alternatives to the five-paragraph essay would be extra, with formulaic writing central to instruction; (3) teachers had little role in student writing development beyond assigning writing; (4) feedback on writing should be ‘objective’ and tied to a grade; and (5) the purpose of ELA is primarily to teach literature. Authors believe identifying preservice teachers’ beliefs about writing and the role of the writing teacher at the beginning of a program can help teacher educators design experiences to expand students’ notions of literacy and of writing instruction.

Interactive Writing (IW) is a powerful support for language and literacy development; however, its emphasis on using oral language to construct written language can present challenges for deaf/Deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) students due to their unique and diverse language experiences. Teachers (n = 14) using Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI) with grade 3–5 d/Dhh students in a variety of settings were observed using a space referred to as ‘the language zone’ to address the unique language and literacy needs of d/Dhh students.  The language zone is the designated space in a classroom where the creation, translation and revision of ideas is made visible.  Researchers developed a flowchart with three tiers to document the three purposes for which the teachers use the space.  Accompanying scenarios provide concrete examples of three distinct ways in which the language zone can be used.  Teachers can use this language zone flow chart as a tool to recognize, analyze and select instructional moves that have the potential to positively impact the language and literacy proficiencies of d/Dhh students.           Acknowledgments: The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R324A120085 to the University of Tennessee. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.

This paper highlights the importance, when researching writing across the lifespan, of addressing a range of aspects of social context which change over time, particularly focusing on tools, values, relationships and identities. It illustrates this argument by drawing on a range of empirical studies exploring different aspects of writing in university settings, working with adults at a range of levels from Masters through doctoral study to academics' working lives, and reflects on the implications of this research for lifespan writing studies more generally. The projects drawn on include a study of multimodal feedback on postgraduate student writing and students' responses to this; a detailed study of academics' writing practices in the context of structural changes in Higher Education; and an interview study with PhD students participating in writing retreats, reflecting on their writing experiences. Drawing on findings from this work, we argue that shifts in material, social and institutional dimensions of context have a significant impact on what individuals write and on the writing practices that they develop. We particularly highlight the role of changing tools for writing and values around writing, and the importance of transformations in identity and relationships. We argue that the tradition of literacy studies research, drawn on by all the projects described in this paper, provides the theoretical and methodological resources to approach such aspects of academic writing development across the lifespan, by adopting a holistic perspective on writing which locates writing as situated practice and thereby provides insight into these social and contextual influences.

Expanding Literate Landscapes: Persons, Practices, and Sociohistoric Perspectives of Disciplinary Development by Kevin Roozen and Joe Erickson (2017) Computers and Composition Digital P/Utah State UP, 2017. Web.

This qualitative study investigates peer feedback among adolescent English and Spanish learners writing together in an extracurricular bilingual literacy program. Data sources include audio recordings, writing revision history on Google documents and interviews. This study reveals the complexity of peer interaction, feedback processes, and the potential for mutual growth. Oriented by Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) and informed by the concept of languaging (Mercer, 2004; Swain, 2006), this study conceptualizes peer feedback as acts that students take to mediate the thinking, writing, and communication processes while working together on a language autobiography. Findings show that students strategically used dynamic feedback acts mediating the writing and revising process, such as 'Ask questions', 'Give information', 'Make corrections'. We also found the use of translanguaging in the feedback acts expanded opportunities for learning as linguistically diverse peers were engaged in metalinguistic discussions, text co-construction, and language experiments. This study contributes to a new understanding of peer feedback which leverages the cultural and linguistic resources students bring to school.

This paper aims to provide a linguistic analysis of prosodic patterns (especially the complex of suprasegmental phonological features which includes intonation, pauses and stress) underlying use of commas in texts written by Brazilian students. The analysed material consists of texts produced in the last year of primary education at a public school in an inner city of São Paulo State, Brazil. The object of analysis is composed of two kinds of comma use which occur in a simple scheme: unconventional uses and conventional uses of commas, both uses being defined from grammatical rules taught at school. The analysis leads to a theoretical discussion about the importance of orality in the way people approach writing and the relationship between orality and writing in text production practices at school. It is argued that accounting for the relationship between orality and literacy may reveal linguistic phenomena and important symbolic processes which are identifiable in the writing of young students who are going through the learning process of writing texts at school.

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

The multidisciplinary research presented in this paper focuses everyday life and social practices that can be characterized by the use of one (or more) language variety, modality or register. Conceptual ideas that arise from explorations based upon empirical analysis of situated and distributed so called monolingual and multilingual oral talk, written communication, signed interactions and embodiment in and across virtual and in-real-life settings inside and outside higher education and schools are presented and discussed. Using sociocultural and decolonial perspectives on language-use or languaging, analytical findings from traditionally segregated fields of study – Literacy Studies, Bilingualism, Deaf education, Language Studies – are juxtaposed. An overarching concern here is framed by the continuing dominance of structural linguistic positions and demarcated fields within the Language and Educational Sciences that frame didactical thinking. The work presented here highlights concerns regarding established concepts like ‘bilingualism’ and ‘codes’ and suggests more empirically relevant alternatives like ‘chaining’, ‘languaging’, ‘fluidity’, ‘timespace’ and ‘visual-orientation’ from ethnographically and netnographically framed projects where data-sets include everyday life in virtual settings and educational institutions in the global North. Focusing social practices – what is communicated and the ways in which communication occurs – challenges currently dominant monolingual and monological perspectives on human language broadly and oral, written and signed languaging specifically.

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

Oral traditions have been limited in their ability to present the full range of a character’s experiences, focusing for the most part on overt actions rather than a character’s inner thoughts. The invention of writing has given writers the ability to reach a distant and often unknown audience and the leisure to mold language in new ways. Writers have thus acquired the ability to place a reader inside a character’s thoughts, either as they are experienced from the inside with mimesis, or by commenting on them omnisciently from the outside with diegesis. Examples are provided of each method of presentation.

Safaliba is an understudied indigenous language. Approximately 7–9,000 Ghanaians speak it in a country with a population of about 26.3 million. It is one of an estimated 73 indigenous Ghanaian languages, none of which have a majority of first language speakers. Safaliba speakers are for the most part subsistence farmers, while a minority are teachers, shopkeepers, tradespeople, and craftspeople who often farm too. The purpose of this essay is to share an encapsulated history of literacy of this proud and strong people, as well as document a Safaliba activist’s resistance to hegemonic discourses in Ghanaian language policy. It is a captivating story because of its intergenerational activism, quiet resistance to government materials, and Safaliba materials development from talk to text. The paper frames Safaliba activism as an indigenous people’s late modern resistance to global pressures that are causing languages to disappear at an unprecedented rate. Data are from a larger linguistic ethnography.

Rosalind Horowitz introduces this special issue of Writing and Pedagogy on "Orality and Literacy in the 21st Century: Prospects for Writing Pedagogy".

This article, integrating different lines of sociocultural and critical research, sets out to analyze argumentative writing in a 6th grade Cypriot Greek elementary classroom. Attention is directed to specific strategies used, such as repetition and paraphrase of each other’s words and of text meanings. These strategies are revisited as voicing tools, arising out of students’ engagement with a nexus of reading and writing events and with the ideological positions constituted through them. The analysis traces the bi-directional processes at work in this polyvocal community. Classroom activities, rather than seen as neutral, are redefined as constituents of a deeply dialogic universe, which privileges specific texts and voices and projects various identity positions onto speakers and writers. At the same time, this universe gives rise to specific scaffolds which help students in the appropriation of advanced generic resources. Students’ argumentative texts are shown to arise out of the integration of various dialogically-emergent strategies. Analysis illustrates how students, while drawing from prior texts, and acknowledging genre-related scaffolds, rework and contest social meanings and generic resources as part of their attempt to assert their voice vis-à-vis those populating their classroom community.

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

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

Academic literacy and student diversity: The case for inclusive practice Ursula Wingate (2015) ISBN-13: 978-1783093472. Pp. 208. Genre-based automated writing evaluation for L2 research writing: From design to evaluation and enhancement Elena Cotos (2014) ISBN-13: 978-1137333360. Pp. 302.

This paper, building on results from a large online embedded language and literacy development project, introduces the notions of ‘cohesion’ and ‘coherence’ in feedback and outlines steps that instructors can take to provide such feedback in their own contexts. Cohesion in feedback can be defined in terms of its goals, audience, and organisation; and coherence in terms of how instances of feedback work together to scaffold a student into developing a deeper understanding of issues in their writing. The paper argues that feedback which is cohesive and coherent is not a collection of reactions to student’s errors/mistakes, but it is a thoughtfully and carefully drafted text which responds to a student’s writing based on an assessment of their needs. The paper includes an evaluation of how students respond to such feedback by sharing examples of students’ drafts, the feedback they received, and their responses to the feedback. This paper helps us in understanding the nature of feedback as well as understanding how to apply it with the goal of making our students stronger, more independent, and self-regulating writers.

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

Students’ limited information literacy skills raise concerns among writing instructors and librarians alike. In order to improve students’ information literacy skills, a librarian and writing instructors at a two-year open-access college collaborated to design information literacy instruction and collected student work to evaluate its effectiveness with regard to students’ ability to find and evaluate sources. Our experience from our collaborative approach indicates that by using specifically designed instructional activities such as concept maps and research logs, students’ ability to think critically about their information literacy skills can be improved.

In coining new terms or proposing a new concept, it is important to survey the new territory to make sure that the land has not been previously inhabited by other peoples. (In fact, much of what passes as new ideas about language in U.S. college composition have already been discussed in applied linguistics.) (Matsuda, 2013: 135) As noted by Paul Matsuda in Chapter 12 of this volume ("It's the Wild West Out There: A New Linguistic Frontier in U.S. College Composition"), compositionists need to ensure that intellectual accountability is observed in a new composition era. Echoing a similar sentiment, Lewis, Jones, and Baker (2012: 649) point out that "a plethora of similar terms (e.g., metrolingualism, polylanguaging, languaging, heteroglossia, codemeshing, translingual practice, flexible bilingualism, multilanguaging and hybrid language practices) makes [the] extension of translanguaging appear in need of focused explication and more precise definition" (emphasis added). While these new terms warrant explication, a point to which I will return later, the above observations also underscore how writing and literacy stand to benefit from developments in applied linguistics.

This study examined the impact of using a multiliteracies pedagogy and the social networking site (SNS), Ning, to help 6th grade English language learners (ELLs) develop their writer identities, with the purpose of increasing the students’ confidence, sense of self, and language and literacy skills. To this end, we were interested in whether and how the development of a writer identity and an increase in social presence on the Ning would translate into face-to-face connections in the physical classroom and an induction into the academic learning community – a space in which the students may have previously felt intimidated. In doing this, we employed a qualitative case study analysis to investigate the experiences of two ELLs at an elementary school in Toronto, Canada. Our study found that incorporating multimodal tools and an SNS allowed the students to more freely express themselves; to share their work and their personalities with peers, which made the writing assignments more meaningful and engaging; and provided a platform for students to negotiate their values and beliefs. Ultimately, the increased interactions with peers online and the development of this new English-language literate identity translated into the development of students’ individual voices, a sense of ownership of English, and an increased social presence in the classroom.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.