Despite extensive research on metadiscourse, methodology descriptions in research articles provide limited guidance on how to identify, classify, and, particularly in cases of clustered items, quantify metadiscourse markers. This article discusses the methodological challenges of analysing metadiscoursal adjectives, using the example of novice academic writers’ use of adjectival interactional metadiscourse markers. Our exploratory analysis of the corpus (654,925 tokens) revealed that, in a non-negligible number of cases (13.5%), metadiscoursal adjectives co-occurred with other linguistic items that were performing different metadiscoursal functions, thus putting a different interpretation on the initial observation. The phenomenon whereby both the adjective and its co-occurring item exercise a prominent metadiscoursal function—which we labelled superimposition —has been observed in previous studies but has not been adequately explored and has led to divergent, and often incomparable approaches, to metadiscourse quantification. We argue that metadiscoursal superimposition as a methodological approach can help bridge the gap between the individual marker analysis and their use in academic writing discourse, thus providing a structured, quantifiable, and functionally richer framework. We discuss the benefits, possible pitfalls, and implications of our proposal that superimposition be included and quantified as a supplementary step in metadiscourse quantification analyses.

This study investigated how reading medium (print vs. digital) and communicative purpose (informative vs. persuasive) shape writing processes and outcomes in integrative academic tasks. Eighty-one university students read three source texts in print or digitally and, after random assignment, produced either an informative or persuasive synthesis within a 2×2 between-subjects design. Keystroke logging recorded pausing across three writing stages, indexing planning, translation, and revision. Text quality was scored with holistic rubrics capturing discourse features and integration of sources. Reading medium significantly influenced pausing: students who read in print paused longer during writing, yet medium had no effect on overall text quality. Task purpose mattered: persuasive tasks yielded higher-quality formal writing, whereas scores reflecting level of source integration did not differ. No interaction between reading medium and task purpose emerged. When controlling for reading comprehension, working memory, and planning ability, the main effects of medium and task purpose remained, but period-specific pausing effects were no longer significant. Findings highlight distinct roles for reading medium and task purpose in shaping writing behavior and performance. The results support cautious causal interpretations and suggest that incorporating digital reading and varying task types may enhance academic writing in higher education, informing curriculum design and assessment.

This article presents findings from a content analysis of 707 articles appearing between 2011 and 2020 in five journals issued by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), a major teaching and research organization in North America. We examined topics and theoretical frameworks, finding that while core topics such as academic writing, curriculum, cultural studies, literacy, and teacher development remained stable, the latter part of the previous decade (2016–2020) showed increased attention to labor, diversity, social justice, and writing program administration, alongside declines in work focused on history, educational policy, ESL, and community writing. Many articles lacked explicit theoretical grounding, often using broad labels like “critical theory,” though use of specified frameworks (e.g., feminist and postcolonial theory) has grown. We identify differences among the journals and discuss the implications of these findings for NCTE, for content analysis as a method and for scholars’ efforts to navigate a complex and expanding field.

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the U.K. government’s means of allocating funding to universities based on assessments of the research they produce. Conducted every five years, this exercise now includes not only the ‘quality’ of research but also its real-world ‘impact’. This helps determine the £7.16 billion distributed annually to universities and influences the reputations of institutions and academics. Writers are therefore keen to make the most persuasive argument for their work they can in these submissions through the narrative case studies that the submission requires. In this article, we examine all 6,361 case studies from the last exercise in 2021 to explore the rhetorical presentation of impact through an analysis of authorial stance. We found considerable use of self-mention, hedges, and boosters, with the hard science fields containing statistically significantly more markers and applied disciplines being particularly strong users. The study contributes to our understanding of stance in academic writing and the role of rhetorical persuasion in high-stakes assessment genres.

For many transnational students in North America, digital literacies entail precarious participation—the adaptive engagement in digital literacy practices under conditions of systemic vulnerability and instability. This multiple case study examines how Chinese international students at a Canadian university perceive and navigate the precarity of their digital literacy practices across national and cultural boundaries. Findings reveal that the four participants exhibit tacit sensitivity to transnational digital precarity, employ strategic adaptation, and engage in measured resistance that cautiously transgresses digital norms. These insights contribute to broader discussions on digital literacies, transnational literacies, and digital precarity, extending and complicating existing frameworks in writing studies, literacy studies, and media studies.

This State of the Inquiry (SotI) critically investigates the implications of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) for interdisciplinary research and scholarly communication within the global English-medium knowledge economy (GEMKE). Anchored in three guiding questions, the article interrogates (1) the extent to which GAI facilitates genuine interdisciplinary knowledge production versus reinforcing entrenched disciplinary silos; (2) how GAI’s dependence on established academic infrastructures influences the visibility and legitimacy of particular interdisciplinary fields; and (3) the impact of automated cross-disciplinary synthesis on the epistemic agency and intellectual labor of human scholars. While GAI holds potential to enhance research efficiency and foster new forms of interdisciplinarity, the outcomes of its integration depend largely on how scholars employ these tools; without critical and contextually informed use, it may contribute to epistemic homogenization and the marginalization of nondominant knowledge systems. The SotI advocates for a critically reflexive and contextually informed approach to the integration of GAI in academic practice, while also recognizing the capacity of scholars—particularly those on the (semi)periphery—to actively shape, adapt, and resist these tools in ways that foster inclusive and transformative interdisciplinary scholarship.

Using multilevel modeling, the current study examined student-level predictors of compositional quality and productivity in Grade 2 Australian children ( N = 544), including handwriting automaticity, literacy skills, executive functioning, writing attitudes, and gender; and classroom-level ( n = 47) variables predicting students’ writing outcomes, including the amount of time for writing practices and the explicit teaching of foundational (handwriting, spelling, grammar) and process writing skills (planning and revision strategies). Multilevel analyses revealed that student-level factors, including gender, general attitudes, and transcription skills (handwriting automaticity and spelling), were key predictors of writing outcomes. Interaction analyses showed that spelling and word reading influenced writing outcomes, with effects varying by gender. At the classroom-level, time spent on planning had a positive effect on students’ compositional quality, and time spent on spelling instruction had a negative effect on students’ compositional productivity. Implications for research and education are discussed.

We report on a longitudinal case study (n = 9) about popularization writing skills in undergraduate interdisciplinary students. Writing skills were determined by analyzing components of the cognitive process model of writing proposed by Hayes. Keystroke logging and video observation were used to analyze the text construction process (the process level) in third-year writing. Genre knowledge (the control level) was analyzed through text analysis and assessment of first-year and third-year texts. Results showed that writing was highly individualized at the process level, including switches between processes, timing, number of edits, and reliance on the source text. At the control level, popularization genre knowledge did not significantly change over time and text quality remained low to average, suggesting a lack in genre knowledge. Choices in the writing process are, thus, not reflected in the quality of the writing product. These findings point to a need for explicit training in popularization discourse alongside academic discourse training.

Because evidence is still limited on writing motivation around the globe and the factors that could influence it, a survey-based quantitative study with 2,067 Costa Rican students from first to sixth grade (84 classrooms in 4 schools) was conducted to explore variations in two constructs of motivation for school writing across school grades and gender in Costa Rican students. Attitudes towards writing were investigated with students from first to sixth grade, while self-efficacy beliefs towards writing were investigated with students from third to sixth grade. Results show that students’ positive attitudes towards writing decreased with grade level, with the highest positive attitudes found in second grade and the lowest in sixth grade. Grade level only determined students’ perceived self-efficacy for generating ideas and concentrating during writing, but not for punctuation and spelling, which is interpreted in relation to the Costa Rican writing education curriculum. Girls from second to sixth grade reported more positive attitudes towards writing than boys; however, they only had higher self-efficacy beliefs for generating ideas and not for punctuation, spelling, or concentrating on a writing task.

Marking the point of departure of the clause, Theme position is used to identify subject matter, the writer’s angle on that subject matter, and the direction of travel of the text. Learning to exploit this cohesive resource is essential to the learning-to-write process, becoming increasingly relevant in late childhood as children begin to write longer texts in a wider variety of registers. This research explores how children achieve this, by comparing texts written by 17 children aged 8-9 and 9-10 years, analyzing changes to thematization and identifying children’s “gateways” into new repertoires. Findings reveal that the writers’ choice of “macroTheme” (an overarching initial thesis statement) significantly influenced subsequent thematic choices. Furthermore, experimentation with new thematic resources reflected the writers’ adoption of a meta-perspective elicited by appropriation of modeled macroThemes, the integration of counterarguments, and recognition of the potential of abstract Themes to provide new insights into lived experience.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has brought into question how much ownership college students feel for “their” writing when it is AI-generated. This study recruited 88 college writers at one midwestern state university in the United States. In a within-subjects design, participants composed poems about a meaningful, challenging life experience, then prompted GenAI to compose a poem about that same event. Results showed significantly greater ownership for human-made poems; additionally, human-made poems were rated as more accurately reflective of selected lived experiences. Aesthetic merit, however, was rated higher for AI-generated poems for imagery, language, and form—but not for originality. Half the students preferred GenAI poems, mainly because of their textual features, while less than half preferred human poems, mainly for personal connections to the events presented. Implications for GenAI as a tool to support creative writing and meaningful literacy are explored.

Recent years have seen renewed attention to the dynamic aspects of second language writing, such as writing processes. Situated in this vein of research, this study uses screen capture, interviews, observations, and analysis of student texts to closely examine the digitally-mediated writing micro-processes of 38 first-year multilingual writers enrolled in composition courses at two U.S. universities. By studying a relatively large data pool, the study complements case studies of multilingual writers’ digitally mediated composing processes to provide a broad picture of multilingual writers’ digitally mediated micro-processes. Drawing on the framework of the extended mind, we show that the participants’ micro-processes incorporated digital tools through three clusters of practices: (1) L1 use through translation, (2) use of text-generators, and (3) self/writing regulation. While the three practices were shown to be widely used by the participants, their use varied depending on the participants’ goals. The study demonstrates the theoretical significance and pedagogical implications of closely examining writing micro-processes as they intersect with the use of digital tools.

This design-based study occurred within a writing methods course in an urban teacher education program. We designed an intervention to develop student teachers’ meta-composing strategies, critical thinking, and justice-oriented reflexivity by revising a teacher-as-writer course assignment to achieve two pedagogical goals: (1) synthesizing antiracist and pedagogical content from curated source texts, and (2) explicating racial literacy as future writing teachers of K-6 students. Using discourse synthesis as both an instructional and research method, we analyzed the synthesis outputs of student teachers during a writing assignment designed to communicate their learnings to an intended audience. Outputs included graphic organizers, planning documents, and a range of final products. We employed discourse synthesis to analyze source and synthesis texts through propositionalization, template formation, and thematic categorization, identifying idea unit origins, progression, or omission. Additionally, content and thematic analyses evaluated instructional strategies and materials to assess whether pedagogical objectives were met. Results indicated discourse synthesis instruction facilitated student engagement with antiracism content, such as historical events, systemic trends, and awareness of racist practices in schools. Findings also highlighted areas for improvement, including modifying source texts, revising the teacher-as-writer assignment, and reevaluating assessment practices in antiracist writing pedagogy.

Digital technologies have dramatically changed the way scientists produce, circulate, and disseminate scientific knowledge. Here we investigate women scientists’ writing activity and digitally mediated discursive practices in their professions. Using survey techniques, we identify patterns of professional and public science communication online across the disciplines. We also explore the potentially interrelated genres—“genre systems”—that routinely enact typified rhetorical actions in their professional contexts. The findings show that their socioliterate activity fully reflects the importance that their professional contexts attach to certain “privileged” genres of professional communication (e.g., journal articles), despite the fact that the respondents value highly genres of socially responsible research (e.g., blogs, infographics). Statistical analyses further confirm that “disciplinary culture” is a determining factor in the extent to which respondents engage with collaborative genres and participatory science genres. We report significant differences in the use of digital mediation tools to communicate science online to both expert and lay audiences. Finally, we discuss several implications for writing pedagogy and the development of digital skills to support scientists, especially women, who want or need to promote and disseminate their research widely.

Drawing upon scholarship on cultural-historical activity theory and writing across difference, this study investigated how students reflect on critical incidents in writing-intensive courses that are expansive by design, that is, spanning courses, semesters, communities, and cultures, and seeking to orient students toward critical incidents as catalysts for expansive learning. Findings indicate that students who reported valuing/understanding critical incidents in developing more expansive conceptualizations of literate activity tended to be further along in their studies, to be enrolled in courses with more reflective writing and semester-long community-engagement projects, and to have assumed significant team responsibilities. Students most frequently reported finding helpful concepts and design elements associated with the expansive-by-design classroom, and least helpful prior knowledge, skills, and experience (or lack thereof). The authors recommend more research into designing and assessing curricula bolstered by a writing across difference framework to illuminate the relationship between agency, sociocritical literacy, critical incidents, and expansive learning.

This article demonstrates how an analysis of the net work of medical social work students in an interprofessional Standardized Patient Program (i.e., healthcare simulation) reveals the productive potential of a Critical Disability Studies orientation to writing studies and workplace research. Standardized Patient Programs were created as a method for uniformly assessing healthcare students’ interpersonal interactions with patients. In practice, they evolved to additionally standardize the professional attitudes and behaviors of students. Structured around three emergent claims, this article uses novel and established technical-rhetorical concepts to unpack how social work students comprehend and navigate issues of power, collaboration, and knowledge exchange within a Standardized Patient Program. And when these claims are further analyzed through a Critical Disability Studies lens, they reveal how disability-related disruptions can constructively challenge medicalized stances toward disability as well as understandings of collaborative labor, workplace/simulation-based writing, and professional discourse.

This article reports on a qualitative assessment of intercultural competence (IC) in U.S. first-year writing (FYW) courses designed to increase intercultural exposure and interaction among domestic and international students. To measure students’ intercultural development via a series of reflective writings, we designed two innovative qualitative analysis tools: a grounded-theory coding scheme and a mapping procedure aligned to the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity. Our results show that qualitative assessment of reflective writing reveals dynamic, complex IC development trajectories, displaying nonlinearity, nondiscrete phases, and development within phases. Specifically, we noted that reflective writing helped students engage with and become attuned to aspects of cultural difference. Affordances of the FYW context indicated that students strongly engaged the cognitive domain of IC, and that this domain appears to be activated by reflective writing.

The study investigates how Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners construct translanguaging space via multimodal orchestration in collaborative English-language YouTube videos introducing Chinese culture. By triangulating multimodal analysis of videos and students’ interview responses, the current research maps translanguaging space construction within and across modes and identifies four multimodal translanguaging space patterns. Meanwhile, learners’ understanding of modal affordances, their intents, their perceptions of the intended audience, and their experiences with relevant (multimodal) texts were found to influence their multimodal orchestration in translanguaging space construction. Digital multimodal composing (DMC) provides EFL learners with opportunities to draw upon their expanded multimodal repertoires, to combine multiple modes for meaning-making creatively, and to transcend the boundaries of languages and modalities critically. Pedagogical suggestions are provided regarding integrating DMC tasks into multilingual learning environments.

This study examines how supervisor-candidate coauthoring collaborations contribute to doctoral students’ writer identity. Three candidates’ coauthorship experiences with their supervisors were investigated in depth using a multiple-case study design. Interviews, written reflections, and email correspondence between coauthors enabled thick descriptions of these candidates’ writer identity formation. Guided by Burgess and Ivanič’s framework of writer identity, the multiple-case study showed how the candidates’ autobiographical selves, discoursal selves, authorial selves, and perceived writer were influenced through the experience of coauthoring with supervisors. Notably, the candidates benefited from supervisor-candidate coauthorship by engaging in scholarly collaborations, bolstering their confidence as academic writers, and strengthening their authorial voice and rhetorical awareness. This study also reveals potential pitfalls or challenges of such collaborations, highlighting key considerations for supervisors and candidates considering coauthorship.

The use of subordination enables language users to achieve syntactic efficiency by allowing them to connect ideas in temporal/logical relation. Although the importance of subordination has been recognized in previous research on second language (L2) writing, it has been typically assessed with global indices that measure overall ratio of subordination. In order to capture more nuanced patterns in the development of L2 writing, this study measures the sophistication of subordination, considering subordination type (adverbialization, complementization, relativization) and finiteness (finite, nonfinite). Our natural language processing analysis of 6,566 timed impromptu essays using the Subordination Sophistication Analyzer 1.0 showed that higher-proficiency L2 learners used more subordination, and, importantly, their patterns of use differed by subordination type and finiteness. Whereas the amount of adverbialization and relativization increased along with proficiency regardless of finiteness, the use of complementization increased only for nonfinite clauses. The broader impacts of this study for education and assessment are discussed.

Researchers’ investment in reader engagement includes the construction of an appealing abstract. While numerous studies have been conducted on abstracts’ rhetorical features, scant empirical attention has been paid to negation use in academic writing. The current study seeks to narrow the research gap from a general and diachronic perspective by adopting an interpersonal model of negation. We found that while not, no, and little tend to be the commonly used negative markers in Science abstracts, little increased diachronically but decreased for not and no. Functionally, writers prefer to use interactive negations and employ relatively more negative markers that function as consequence (interactive dimension) and hedging (interactional dimension) in their abstracts. Finally, we discuss the possible reasons for such results as well as their pedagogical implications.

The study examines a corpus of 306 request emails written by 32 English-speaking (ES) teachers and 121 L2 learners from distinctive L1 backgrounds (i.e., Chinese, French, Spanish) and with different levels of L2 proficiency. Pragmatic competence is analyzed through the coding of direct and indirect request strategies used in formal and informal email writing. Findings reveal the influences of communicative situation, L1 background, and L2 proficiency on pragmatic competence in email writing. First, L2 learners show a significantly lower degree of situational variability compared with ES teachers. Second, L1 backgrounds have a significant impact on L2 writing performance. Third, L2 learners with higher English proficiency tend to use more indirect request strategies, but they have not developed pragmatic competence to adjust their usage across written contexts. Findings are discussed in relation to pedagogical implications for developing writing competence of L2 learners, which should be attuned to diverse rhetorical expectations and individual needs.

ChatGPT and other LLMs are at the forefront of pedagogical considerations in classrooms across the academy. Many studies have spoken to the technology’s capacity to generate one-off texts in a variety of genres. This study complements those by inquiring into its capacity to generate compelling texts at scale. In this study, we quantitatively and qualitatively analyze a small corpus of generated texts in two genres and gauge it against novice and published academic writers along known dimensions of linguistic variation. Theoretically, we position and historicize ChatGPT as a writing technology and consider the ways in which generated text may not be congruent with established trajectories of writing development in higher education. Our study found that generated texts are more informationally dense than authored texts and often read as dialogically closed, “empty,” and “fluffy.” We close with a discussion of potentially explanatory linguistic features, as well as relevant pedagogical implications.

In this work, we explore the use of digital technologies and statistical analysis to monitor how Italian secondary school students’ writing changes over time and how comparisons can be made across different high school types. We analyzed more than 2,000 exam essays written by Italian high school students over 13 years and in five different school types. Four indicators of writing characteristics were considered—text length, text complexity, and two indicators of source use, all extracted using natural language processing tools—which provided insights into students’ citation practices over time and in different school contexts. In particular, we measured the portion of students’ essays that included text from source material as well as the amount of copied text that was not properly referenced. We found that student essays became shorter in length over time while also getting more complex. We also found that the tendency to copy uncited text in the essay decreased. High school curricula predict different writing strategies: essays written by students attending scientific and humanistic high schools are longer and less subject to incorrect citations. We argue that such text analysis enables the study of writing features in high school classes and supports the evaluation of curricula.

Using case study methodology, this article analyzes the collaborative writing of three adolescent girls, one Latina and two Black, composing a group poem in an after-school spoken word poetry team. Drawing from literature on distributed cognition and embodiment, we found that participants utilized a system of writing techniques “on the page,” as well as a variety of embodied and social practices “off the page” in their team meetings to collaboratively compose this poem. We argue that focusing on the intersection of distributed cognition and embodiment in collaborative writing allows writing researchers to more fully attend to the collaborative sociality of all writing and allows teachers to support youth writers in recognizing and gaining collaborative writing skills for professional and creative writing contexts.

Given Wikipedia’s breadth of coverage, social impact, and longevity as an impactful open knowledge resource, the encyclopedia has been the subject of considerable interdisciplinary research. Building on scholarship related to collaboration, authorship, ownership, and editing in Wikipedia, this study sought to better understand Wikipedians as writers, paying specific attention to their sense of ownership. While previous research has shown that editors engage in individualist editing practices at times, often ignoring community-mediated policy regarding ownership, findings from a mixed-method survey of 117 editors demonstrate the existence of both “individual” and “community” notions of ownership that often reinforce, or mutually inform, each other. This study adds clarity to these issues by demonstrating how feelings of individual ownership, voice, and pride in writing often occur in collaborative circumstances. This research ultimately extends our understanding of collaborative writing in what is one of the most well-known collaborative websites. Despite contemporary theoretical strides advocating for relinquishing ownership concepts in favor of distributed or ecological frameworks, the concept of ownership remains prevalent within digital writing communities, exemplified by Wikipedia.

The letter of recommendation (LOR) is a stylized form of direct sponsorship, a rhetorical appeal that confers favor on a person or object in keeping with the writer’s—or sponsor’s—character, authority, and expertise. In response to Swales’s call to “unveil” the rhetorical features of occluded genres, this research employs a move-step analysis to determine the rhetorical features of a sample of 83 LORs written by college faculty and administrators for a nationally competitive, postgraduate fellowship. This study finds five core moves expressed in its LOR sample: (1) sponsor positioning, (2) applicant performance, (3) applicant attributes, (4) future projection, and (5) audience appeals. Our discussion offers three key insights and provides macro-level takeaways in an effort to raise rhetorical awareness for LOR writers and requestors alike.

Developing academic writers must continually position themselves discursively as they negotiate institutional, programmatic, and disciplinary contexts. The inextricable relationship of writing and identities raises questions of access to social identities in schools, a particularly salient issue when considering the complexities and challenges of the high school to college transition for students from historically marginalized groups. This study focuses on Jain, a first-generation Latino college student, as he positions himself as a writer over 18 months in response to a range of school-based writing tasks. My analysis finds that Jain’s identity negotiations are influenced by a history of social positioning in schools, as his stance-making patterns and sense of self as a writer reflect resources and opportunities he encounters. This study adds to research demonstrating the role teachers and institutions can play in (in)validating certain aspects of students’ identities and influencing belonging in school spaces, indicating a need for educators and researchers across K-12 and college contexts to continue to challenge the standardization of school writing and the prevalence of assessments that limit curricula and constrain identities.

In order to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the varied ways multiple language competencies are invoked in scientific communication and publication, this study features a content analysis of a collection of English, French, and Arabic abstracts from 14 articles of Al-Awamia, a Moroccan agronomic journal. Mapping rhetorically significant differences across abstracts in different languages suggests that EN/FR abstracts are tailored to an international specialist audience and Arabic abstracts favor a domestic policymaker audience in several key ways. The textual moves made to address these different audiences are typical of those studied by scholars of science communication, and accordingly this study indicates that plurilingual textual practices in scientific writing are associated with differences in audience and stakeholders. These findings carry implications for trans/pluri/multilingually oriented scholars of scientific communication, as well as for those who prepare future researchers for the demands of publication, suggesting that the flexible use of diverse linguistic resources is important to scientific practice in a globalized world.

This article reports on a mentoring case from a transdisciplinary, longitudinal writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) initiative in which the situated complexities of integrating new writing pedagogies were observed and supported. Considering this case through an agential realist lens, we introduce the concept of “discursive turbulence”: an emergent quality of situated semiotic activity produced from the continual mixing of discourses. Discursive turbulence can emerge in myriad and complex ways, including fits-and-starts of pedagogical development, mismatched discursive alignments, affective signs of struggle and intensity, and nonlinear patterns of change. Through a series of four vignettes, we illustrate discursive turbulence as it emerged while pedagogical changes around writing were being implemented by an environmental sciences professor. We suggest that discursive turbulence is to be expected in heterodisciplinary spaces, and we argue that attention to discursive turbulence will lead to more robust accounts of learning, becoming, and literate activity, as well as new ways of supporting pedagogical becoming.

This essay takes as its focus the everyday writing that people compose: the self-sponsored, nonobligatory texts that people write mainly outside of work and school. Through analysis of 713 survey responses and 27 interviews with accompanying writing samples, this study provides a panoramic view of the functions of self-sponsored writing and rhetorical activity for U.S. adults, ages 18 to 65+ years, from a range of geographic, cultural, and professional backgrounds. The Taxonomy of Life Writing presented in this essay demonstrates the range of ways that writing functions in people’s daily lives. It includes 19 key functions of life writing, organized into six metafunctions: Creativity and Expression, Identity and Relationships, Organization and Coordination, Preservation and Memory, Reflection and Emotion, and Teaching and Learning. Based on our findings, we affirm the important and diverse functions that life writing serves and propose expanding the threshold concepts of writing to include greater focus on nonobligatory, self-sponsored writing activity.

The Chilean curriculum for writing education includes five paradigms: cultural, macro-linguistic, micro-linguistic, procedural, and communicative. The implementation of such a poly-paradigmatic curriculum can occur in multiple ways. Therefore, we analyzed classroom practices with two aims: (a) to describe how the paradigms are evident across practices, and (b) to analyze the paradigms’ internal alignment within each practice. We conducted classroom observations with five Spanish language teachers with varied orientations toward writing instruction. A content analysis of teachers’ discourse formed the basis for a narrative case-by-case analysis and a cross-case analysis. This process was guided by data collected during a previous survey study and supported by teachers’ interviews. Findings revealed that the cultural, macro- and micro- linguistic paradigms were implemented most often, while the implementation of procedural and communicative paradigms was rare. Additionally, paradigm alignment was visible in two practices but not in other practices. Possible reasons for this lack of integration and potential solutions to resolve this issue are discussed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a renewed interest in intergenerational letter and email writing. Evidence shows that expressive writing, including letter writing, has a number of benefits including improved literacy and perceived well-being, and it can also facilitate a deep connection with another person. This scoping review provides an overview of the existing research on letter and email writing between different age cohorts. Of the 471 articles retrieved from Scopus, CINAHL, PsycINFO, MEDLINE, Academic Search Premier, and Web of Science, 17 studies met the inclusion criteria and were critically appraised and synthesized in this review. The studies were grouped into two themes according to their stated aims and outcomes: (a) studies exploring changes in perceptions, and (b) studies relating to skills development and bonds. The results showed a range of benefits for intergenerational letter writers, from more positive perceptions of the other age group, through improved writing skills and subject knowledge, to forming intergenerational memories and bonds. The review also highlights some of the limitations of the current research and formulates recommendations for future studies in the fields of writing studies, intergenerational research, and educational gerontology.

This article describes a qualitative study of how two ethnic Burmese families in the United States authored storybooks that included their children’s drawings and writings representing their families’ stories. The theoretical perspectives of storytelling and the social semiotics multimodal approach were utilized in this inquiry. The data included interviews, video recordings of the storybook-writing process, artifacts, and informal conversations. The data were collected when both families participated in the study together. The findings show that the children took the lead in authoring and composing their storybooks and carefully chose the topics for their drawings and writings and that the process was mediated through their mothers’ oral storytelling and conversations with siblings and friends. The findings suggest that schools and teachers need to incorporate multimodal storytelling into class activities and use storytelling to support children’s agency.

This article examines how participants in literacy events mediate the validation and legitimacy of official documents. Through articulating the perspectives of literacy as a social practice, paperwork studies, and the analysis of administrative burdens, we argue that the value of official documents is unstable and can fluctuate between valid and invalid each time applicants and frontline workers redefine the context of use. Through ethnographic observation, we gathered data on the historical production of birth certificates and the social construction of their meaning. We documented a participant’s unsuccessful efforts to renew her voter’s ID card over several years and in different government offices. We show how government employees rejected or accepted the same official birth certificate she presented, depending on how she framed her paperwork. Its meaning relied on the articulation of the negotiated administrative purpose, the definition of the context of use, and the document’s materiality.

This study examined whether the linguistic distance between the first (L1) and second (L2) language is a significant determinant of L2 writing skills of 292 adult immigrants from 39 different source countries, who were beginner learners of Spanish L2. Gender, age, length of residence in Spain, education level as a proxy for literacy skills in L1, enrolment in Spanish language courses, and overall communicative competence in Spanish were also considered. Using both standard procedures for assessing L2 writing and performance-based psycholinguistic measures of accuracy and text-production fluency, the findings highlight the important role of linguistic proximity in achieving greater accuracy, text-production fluency, and overall L2 writing scores. Other significant predictors were age, enrolment in Spanish courses, and education level for accuracy; and length of residence in Spain and education level for text-production fluency. Although length of residence in Spain was negatively associated with text-production fluency in L2 writing, mediation analyses revealed that the effect of age on text-production fluency was mediated by length of residence in Spain and that L2 proficiency level mediated the link between linguistic distance and text-production fluency. Furthermore, most of the errors that these immigrants made were morphosyntactic and spelling errors, while vocabulary errors were rare.

We report on a college-level study of student reflection and instructor prompts using scoring and corpus analysis methods. We collected 340 student reflections and 24 faculty prompts. Reflections were scored using trait and holistic scoring and then reflections and faculty prompts were analyzed using Natural Language Processing to identify linguistic features of high, middle, and low scoring reflections. The data sets were then connected to determine if there was a relationship between faculty prompts and scores. Additional analysis was completed to determine if there was a relationship between scores and students’ GPAs. The corpus linguistics analysis showed that higher-scoring reflections used words that referred to the self, the writing process, and specific rhetorical terms. Additional analysis showed student GPAs did not correlate with holistic scores but that higher scoring reflections were from faculty who included learning goals on reflective writing prompts. Results suggest that teachers can de-mystify reflective writing by linking learning outcomes to textual tasks and that corpus linguistics methods can provide an understanding of how local learning goals are transmitted to students.

In science disciplines, students need sufficient and well-designed support to successfully gain writing competence along the different stages of their writing development. This study examines effective inquiry-based writing pedagogies and the contextualization of scientific writing instruction for supporting student writers in the scientific community. The researchers first systematically reviewed effective pedagogical practices that can help students gain writing competence through inquiry-based learning, then explicated how scientific writing is situated in inquiry-based writing instruction (IBWI) with respect to text structures using a genre-based approach. A systematic review of 40 empirical studies published between 2000 and 2021 was conducted. The researchers examined the pedagogies, methods, and models that effectively support IBWI and identified some emerging trends that aim to raise undergraduates’ scientific writing communicative competence. Implications for how scientific writing should be situated in IBWI were provided to help disciplinary faculty respond more precisely to science students’ writing needs in tertiary settings.

Current cognitive and sociocognitive models of writing conceptualize writing processes as complex interactions between multidimensional mechanisms that activate a writer’s social motivations, psychomotor processes, and cognitive resources in order to engage in writing. These models have been developed through years of empirical research employing a variety of data channels, such as keystroke logging; however, research about mobile writing processes have been understudied. This paper presents a study of mobile writing processes that used keystroke-logging methods in order to expand scholarship of writing processes into the realm of mobile writing. By examining how participants ( N = 10) wrote on mobile devices at the keystroke level, as well as combining textual and keystroke analysis to examine context text-message (SMS) composition, this study argues for theoretically framing mobile writing as an embodied performance.

Research shows that writing motivation decreases throughout schooling and predicts writing performance. However, this evidence comes primarily from cross-sectional studies. Here, we adopted a longitudinal approach to (a) examine the development of attitudes toward writing, writing self-efficacy domains, and motives to write from Grade 6 to 7, and (b) test their longitudinal and concurrent contribution to the quality of opinion essay in Grade 7, after controlling for quality in Grade 6. For that, 112 Portuguese students completed motivation-related questionnaires and composed two opinion essays in Grade 6 and 1 year later, in Grade 7. Findings showed that, while attitudes and all motives to write declined, self-efficacy did not. Additionally, opinion essay quality in Grade 7 was associated with essay quality in Grade 6 as well as with self-efficacy for self-regulation and intrinsic motives in Grade 7. In other words, current motivational beliefs seem more important to students’ writing quality than their past beliefs. This conclusion means that, in order to fostering students’ writing performance, middle-grade teachers should nurture their positive beliefs about writing by placing a higher value on writing motivation in the classroom.

It is important to understand multilingual students’ lived experiences and sense-making in their everyday written communication before rethinking the implementation of translingual writing in college composition classrooms. Unpacking multilinguals’ written communication across social and academic contexts, this exploratory qualitative study integrates digital ethnographic and interview methods to examine the first-semester communication experiences of 10 undergraduate students. The findings indicate that while participants engaged in translingual written communication as part of their lived experiences in social contexts, they were reluctant to draw upon their home language in academic settings. Based on the findings, I discuss the pedagogical implications of supporting multilingual students in college composition classrooms. I argue that instructors must reposition themselves as co-learners together with their multilingual students to enact a translingual stance in academic settings and reimagine meaningful written communication beyond English-only. This study sheds light on rethinking the pedagogical practices around implementing translingualism in college composition.

Metadiscourse guides how readers interact with a text and process the information they find. Because texts differ in purpose and audience, so do patterns of metadiscourse use. This research examines the patterns of metadiscourse use in topic-based writing, developed following a structured authoring method. The resulting writing is modular, nonhierarchical, and nonlinear, which creates user experience issues related to attention as well as information selection, ordering, processing, and navigation. The patterns of language use in topic-based writing reveal how metadiscourse might help readers address these reader experience issues.

Language-oriented literacy standards offer mostly linguistic accounts of text complexity. In response, the present article demonstrates that multimodal and visual narratives offer additional ways to understand and discuss text complexity. This descriptive analysis of one fourth-grader’s comic provides an account of the multimodal patterns and orchestration noted across the pages of the comic. Data sources included the published comic, as well as a multimodal artifact elicitation interview conducted with Sabrina, a fourth-grade student. The authors show how Sabrina constructed a complex multimodal text by drawing not only from her knowledge of image and written language but also from her experiences with spoken language, touch, facial expressions, and gesture. These findings suggest that it would be beneficial for teachers and researchers to continue to create curricular space for multimodal composing opportunities and that stakeholders in language arts and communication education might deepen collaborations to develop instructional frameworks that support students as they compose using modes beyond language across the grade levels.

Millions of users write and read freely accessible texts every day on online literary platforms (OLPs). Intra-platform surveys aside, only very few studies have considered the demographics of digital readers and authors. Our exploratory study of avid OLP users helps to close this research gap. We requested an international sample of OLP users (13 years and above) to complete an online questionnaire. Our survey gathered demographic data and information about participants’ OLP usage, motivation, (communicative) relationship with other users, and perceptions of the positive effects of OLP usage ( Nmax = 315). Among others, our results not only reinforce the theoretical concept of wreading but also indicate that OLPs are likely to enhance the pleasure derived from writing and reading. Our data show that OLP usage is not limited to adolescent users. Reportedly, for participants from Generation Y as well as from Generation Z, the experience of creative freedom and the possibility to get direct reader feedback are major motivational factors to write on OLPs. Also, our data indicate that our surveyed writers on OLPs prefer short stories. We call for more longitudinal investigations and for a common theoretical framework, in order to strengthen future research on digital literature practices and to be able to implement the didactic potential of OLPs in the classroom.

This article presents findings from a study of a U.K. university writing centre regarding understandings of tutor roles, involving 33 Chinese international students, 11 writing tutors, and the centre director. The research used interviews and audio-recorded consultations as data to analyze and explore participants’ beliefs and understandings. The most common roles associated with tutors were proofreader, coach, commentator, counsellor, ally, and teacher. Mismatches were found in understandings of the proofreader role and counsellor role when comparing students’ views, tutors’ views, and the writing centre policy. Policy recommendations are made in light of the findings regarding how writing centres frame the tutor’s role and the function of writing consultations, in terms of (1) interrogating traditional conceptualizations of tutor role, (2) disseminating the centre’s aims to the student population and to the wider university, (3) expanding the centre’s activity across the university, and (4) strengthening tutor training and development.

In this study, we examined burst length and its relation with working memory, attentional control, transcription skills, discourse oral language, and writing quality, using data from English-speaking children in Grade 2 ( N = 177; Mage = 7.19). Results from structural equation modeling showed that burst length was related to writing quality after accounting for transcription skills, discourse oral language, working memory, and attentional control. Burst length completely mediated the relations of attentional control and handwriting fluency to writing quality, whereas it partially mediated the relations of working memory and spelling to writing quality. Discourse oral language had a suppression effect on burst length but was positively and independently related to writing quality. Working memory had an indirect relation to burst length via transcription skills, whereas attentional control had a direct and indirect relation. These results suggest roles of domain-general cognitions and transcription skills in burst length, and reveal the nature of their relations to writing quality.

The process of responding to supervisory feedback requires student writers to position themselves toward both the provider and content of that feedback, indicating their stance in the interaction and their evolving disciplinary competence. How positionings are discursively shaped, developed, and enacted to influence thesis revisions, however, has been relatively unexplored. In this article, we trace how two master’s students construct their positions in supervisory interactions and in the subsequent revisions of their literature review drafts. Through discourse and intertextual analyses, we propose three dimensions of interpersonal positioning ( cooperative, self-assertive, explorative) that are co-constructed to reinforce local supervisory cooperation and modify conceptualizations of the research work. We highlight scaffolded, responsive, and reflexive types as concrete expressions of mediated positioning which help regulate the ways students orientate to their writing and their discipline.

This article contributes to an emerging body of scholarship on multimodal composition in the poetry classroom through a study of Finnish lower secondary students’ digital videomaking in response to poetry. The study explores students’ use of semiotic resources in their interpretive work in transmediating a poem into a digital video, with a particular interest in their use of sound elements. Based on social semiotic theory of multimodality, the analysis shows how the students in a variety of ways used sound elements, together with other semiotic resources, to explore their interpretation of the poetic text. Sound elements in particular became a key resource in the interpretive work, giving the students the opportunity to elaborate on topical issues of interest and importance to them while reinforcing their social agency. The study demonstrates the relevance of sound elements in students’ digital composing and explorations of poetry. Furthermore, it reveals how the students showed a capacity as well as a willingness to act, to have influence, and to make substantiated claims for recognition regarding critical issues related to sexuality and society.

This article centers on Faith, a Latinx bilingual student who, because of her failure to pass a standardized exam in English language arts, had to repeat 11th-grade English. Despite this stigma of being a “repeater,” during the year-long ethnographic study I conducted in her classroom, Faith proved to be an insightful and critical reader and self-described poet who shared her writing with her peers as well as with other poets in online forums. Drawing from that more expansive classroom study, this article features Faith’s metacommentary on language and her own writing process and explores how her insights (1) disrupt monoglossic, raciolinguistic ideologies by highlighting the disconnect between her sophisticated understandings of language and the writing process and her status as a “struggling” student; (2) draw attention her wayfinding, which chronicles her navigation of those ideologies that complicate her search for a writerly identity and obscure the translingual nature of all texts and all writers; and (3) can move teachers and researchers of writing to reimagine the writing classroom so that it (re)positions students like Faith as “writers in residence,” whose existing translingual writing practices and wayfinding can serve as mentors and guides for others.

This article explores the writing and reading requirements of the literacy practices, events, and texts characteristic of work mediated by the online labor platforms of the gig economy, such as Airtasker and Freelancer, which bring together people needing a job done with those willing to do it. These emerging platform-based discourse communities and their associated literacies are a new domain of social activity. Based on an examination of seven gig economy platforms, the present article examines the core literacy event in the gig economy, the posting and bidding for tasks, together with the texts that enhance and support this process. While some tasks require written texts as the outcome or product, all tasks involve the creation of some form of written text as part of doing the work. These texts are both interactional and interpersonal. As well as being a part of negotiating and then getting a task done, they relate to the complexities of building the identities, knowledge, and relationships required of those working in a virtual work space rather than a traditional workplace. While most of these texts reflect familiar text types, the core text cycle is argued to be an “emergent” genre. Implications for education are presented.