This article uses a novel theoretical frame—materio-cognitivism—to explore how digital writing processes change with time and experience. Researchers observed 10 second langauge writers as they completed two research writing tasks—one at the start of their first year of university and one near the end of university. Interviews and screen recording were used to track writing activity. Five key writing strategies were identified. Among the most improved writers, researchers identified a set of shared changes in how writing strategies were deployed. In particular, the most improved writers showed increased ability to sequence subtasks, to arrange digital interfaces, and to combine internal cognitive functions with the affordances of digital tools. These findings suggest what the development of writing processes might look like in digital environments, potentially informing both writing pedagogy and assessment.

Combining keystroke logging, screen recordings, interviews, and text quality assessment in two mixed-methods studies with technical writers, this research (1) identifies defining variables of technical writing processes and (2) examines their correlations with and predictive power for text quality. Study 1, an exploratory investigation with 10 participants, identified 22 distinct writing behaviors under six categories of information searching, information reusing, content shaping, organization structuring, language styling, and layout designing during planning, translating, and reviewing sessions. These behavioral variables, together with time-related variables, were subsequently analyzed as “process indicators” in a comparative experiment with 43 participants across experience levels. Results of Study 2 revealed significant differences among experience levels in writing speed, planning duration, pause, search, reuse, content shaping, and structuring. Detailed planning and systematic content/structure editing were strongly associated with higher-quality texts. Building on these findings, we propose a process model of technical writing, explain its correlations with writing score, and depict process profiles of different experience levels. We also highlight the importance of information processing skills in enhancing writing efficiency, offering empirical guidance for technical writing instruction and professional training.

This article reports a case study of teachers’ enactment of writing instruction for adult learners in Swedish as a second language at lower secondary level in municipal education. It highlights instructional practices and discourses surrounding writing in three classrooms. The analysis centers on literacy events initiated by teachers to support adult learners’ final individual assignments. Data consist of classroom observations (24 hours) and informal interviews with teachers. The findings reveal that teachers adopt different positions in their teaching. There are varying levels of support for students, with varying numbers of literacy events occurring both inside and outside the classroom. Teachers universally adjust their methods based on contextual factors, including diverse student groups, local agreements on content, and time constraints, raising questions about equality. Furthermore, a text-focused approach prioritizes templates and models over content. As a result, writing assignments emphasize genre awareness rather than personal views, thoughts, or experiences. In sum, teachers' pedagogical choices in writing instruction are shaped by their beliefs about writing, learning to write, and contextual factors. These differences in teaching practices seem to provide students with partly unequal opportunities for writing development. This is further elaborated in the discussion.

ChatGPT has created considerable anxiety among teachers concerned that students might turn to large language models (LLMs) to write their assignments. Many of these models are able to create grammatically accurate and coherent texts, thus potentially enabling cheating and undermining literacy and critical thinking skills. This study seeks to explore the extent LLMs can mimic human-produced texts by comparing essays by ChatGPT and student writers. By analyzing 145 essays from each group, we focus on the way writers relate to their readers with respect to the positions they advance in their texts by examining the frequency and types of engagement markers. The findings reveal that student essays are significantly richer in the quantity and variety of engagement features, producing a more interactive and persuasive discourse. The ChatGPT-generated essays exhibited fewer engagement markers, particularly questions and personal asides, indicating its limitations in building interactional arguments. We attribute the patterns in ChatGPT’s output to the language data used to train the model and its underlying statistical algorithms. The study suggests a number of pedagogical implications for incorporating ChatGPT in writing instruction.

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.

This mixed-methods study examined the effects of different models of online professional development (PD) on 21 US elementary teachers’ writing instruction, on the teachers’ confidence, and on students’ writing quality. Participants were first-grade teachers who were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: Coaching-plus-Manual (C+M), Manual (M), or Business-as-Usual (BAU). All teachers received online-PD but the C+M and the M conditions received PD on genre-based writing-strategy instruction. The M group taught using only the manual of that approach but the C+M also received coaching. Results found that C+M teachers increased the most in their writing confidence, and C+M students wrote papers of better quality at posttest compared to the M and BAU students.

Drawing on a larger year-long ethnography at a public, urban, comprehensive high school in the Midwestern United States, this article describes the texts students composed in a co-taught sophomore (grade 10) humanities course combining social studies and English language arts. Bringing together sociocultural perspectives on literacy and composition with queer theorizations of time, I argue for the utility of attending not only to time’s multi dimensionality but also its multi directionality. Doing so in writing instruction can help thaw binary polarization and foster more humanizing temporal and in turn ideological movements. To illustrate, I present an ethnographic case of students writing about the history of gendered clothing in 20th-century U.S. society. I examine how different temporal ideologies had consequences for students (not) reproducing antagonistic, polarized binaries with respect to oppressive values, in particular anti-LGBTQIA+ values as they intersect with class, race, and politics. Although my emphasis is how gender and sexuality intertwine with economics, race, and politics, this article suggests that attending to the multidimensionality and multidirectionality of time is a productive site for scholars and educators committed to praxes of justice in writing instruction.

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 primary purpose of this study is to investigate the degree to which register knowledge, register-specific motivation, and diverse linguistic features are predictive of human judgment of writing quality in three registers—narrative, informative, and opinion. The secondary purpose is to compare the evaluation metrics of register-partitioned automated writing evaluation models in three conditions: (1) register-related factors alone, (2) linguistic features alone, and (3) the combination of these two. A total of 1006 essays ( n = 327, 342, and 337 for informative, narrative, and opinion, respectively) written by 92 fourth- and fifth-graders were examined. A series of hierarchical linear regression analyses controlling for the effects of demographics were conducted to select the most useful features to capture text quality, scored by humans, in the three registers. These features were in turn entered into automated writing evaluation predictive models with tuning of the parameters in a tenfold cross-validation procedure. The average validity coefficients (i.e., quadratic-weighed kappa, Pearson correlation r, standardized mean score difference, score deviation analysis) were computed. The results demonstrate that (1) diverse feature sets are utilized to predict quality in the three registers, and (2) the combination of register-related factors and linguistic features increases the accuracy and validity of all human and automated scoring models, especially for the registers of informative and opinion writing. The findings from this study suggest that students’ register knowledge and register-specific motivation add additional predictive information when evaluating writing quality across registers beyond that afforded by linguistic features of the paper itself, whether using human scoring or automated evaluation. These findings have practical implications for educational practitioners and scholars in that they can help strengthen consideration of register-specific writing skills and cognitive and motivational forces that are essential components of effective writing instruction and assessment.

Teaching linguistic aspects relevant to text construction is an essential component of any thorough writing instruction program, despite the conflicting evidence regarding its effectiveness. In this study, 889 second- and fourth-grade students were assigned to one of three conditions: Self-Regulated Development (SRSD), SRSD-connectors (SRSD-C), and business-as-usual (BAU). The experimental conditions addressed planning and self-regulation strategies to write opinion essays, but only the SRSD condition included explicit teaching of connectors (e.g., because) and discourse markers (e.g., In conclusion). Children in both experimental conditions outscored children in the BAU condition across grades and outcome variables. In addition, the SRSD condition showed larger effect sizes on Grade 2 children’s gains in text quality, number of genre-appropriate elements, and number of connectors than the SRSD-C condition. The study provides evidence of the effectiveness of explicitly teaching functionally motivated linguistic representations within a SRSD program. Theoretical and educational implications are discussed.

Drawing on recent decades, literature in college writing that theorizes the importance of Critical Language Awareness (CLA) curricula for African American Language (AAL)-speaking students, this article offers empirical evidence on the design and implementation of a college writing curriculum centered on CLA and its influence on AAL–speaking students’ language ideologies with respect to both speech and writing. Qualitative analyses of students’ pre- and-post-Questionnaires and the researcher’s field notes demonstrate that the curriculum helped students view AAL as an independent, natural, and legitimate language and view themselves as critically conscious thinkers and writers—more likely and willing to develop their academic writing skills and the strategies that support employing their native language in writing—for example, code-meshing strategies. This study offers important implications for college writing instruction.

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.

Source-based writing is a common but difficult task in history and philosophy. Students are usually taught how to write a good text in language classes. However, it is also important to address discipline-specificity in writing, a topic likely to be taught by content teachers. In order to design discipline-specific writing instruction, research needs to identify which reading and writing activities during the source-based writing process affect students’ thought process quality and text quality, as assessed by content teachers. We conducted a think-aloud study with 15 (11th grade) students who performed two source-based writing assignments, each representative of its discipline. From the data, we derived 11 activities, which we analyzed for duration, frequency, and time of occurrence. Results showed that the disciplines required different approaches to writing. For philosophy, the writing process was dominant and influenced quality, leading us to conclude that philosophical thinking and writing are intertwined. For history, the planning process appeared to be paramount, but it influenced text quality only and not the quality of the thought process. In other words, historical thinking and writing appear to be separate processes. Our findings can be used to develop strategy instruction that reinforces better writing, adapted to discipline-specific writing processes.

Writing requires a high level of nuanced decision-making related to language, purpose, audience, and medium. Writing teachers thus need a deep understanding of language, process, and pedagogy, and of the interface between them. This article draws on reflexivity theory to interrogate the pedagogical priorities and perspectives of 19 writing teachers in primary classrooms across Australia. Data are composed of teacher interview transcripts and nuanced time analyses of classroom observation videos. Findings show that teachers experience both enabling and constraining conditions that emerge in different ways in different contexts. Enablements include high motivations to teach writing and a reflective and collaborative approach to practice. However, constraints were evident in areas of time management, dominance of teacher talk, teachers’ scope and confidence in their knowledge and practice, and a perceived lack of professional support for writing pedagogy. The article concludes with recommendations for a reflexive approach to managing these emergences in the teaching of writing.

Language learning is context-dependent and requires learners to employ different sets of language skills to fulfill various tasks. Yet standardized English as a foreign language assessments tend to conceptualize English proficiency as a unidimensional construct. In order to distinguish English proficiency as separate context-driven constructs, I adopted a register-based approach to investigate academic English proficiency (i.e., specific set of language skills that support academic literacy) and general English proficiency (i.e., wide range of language skills undifferentiated by context that are measured by traditional assessments) as separate predictors of overall essay quality. In the study, students completed a general English proficiency assessment and an academic language proficiency assessment, and essays were coded for academic writing features at the lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels. Beyond the contribution of academic writing features and general English proficiency, academic English proficiency emerged as a significant contributor to essay quality. Findings suggest that academic English proficiency scores more precisely identified a subset of academic language skills that is relevant to essay writing. The article concludes by discussing implications for strategic writing instruction that articulates the key expectations of academic writing used in and beyond school contexts.

The writing of transnational youth has continued to emerge as a promising area of research in writing and literacy studies, and yet despite the breadth of this work, few studies have examined transnational students’ writing about social and racial justice. Drawing on theoretical contributions of coloniality, this article highlights the experiences of one immigrant adolescent’s participation in a secondary ethnic studies course in California. In this study, photovoice was used as a mutually informing classroom writing pedagogy and research methodology to understand how students in an ethnic studies course problematize the dominance of Whiteness in school. I specifically analyze field notes and a focal student’s writing and interviews to demonstrate (a) her understandings of her participation in this course and (b) the ways in which her writing of self was a form of curricular justice that spanned school and home. These findings help to amplify writing as a tool for social justice and remind us that literacy and students’ histories are inextricably linked.

This mixed-methods study investigates writers’ task representation and the factors affecting it in test-like and non-test-like conditions. Five advanced-level L2 writers wrote two argumentative essays each, one in test-like conditions and the other in non-test-like conditions where the participants were allowed to use all the time and online materials they needed. The writing was done on computers, and we recorded the writing process and keystrokes using the Screen Capture Video and Inputlog programs. We audio recorded stimulated recall interviews after each writing session, with the writers reporting and commenting on their writing strategies and their reasons for following them. The findings of this study suggest that there are several factors that play a role in task representation, such as previous education, personal beliefs, and task conditions. Although these factors were present in all participants’ responses, the differences in the writers’ approaches to interpret and execute the writing were marked. The results highlight various pedagogical issues and options related to teaching writing in general and to the place of task representation on writing programs in particular.

Negotiating membership within a disciplinary community is as much an exercise in rhetorical facility as it is content expertise. Where individuals reside in the hierarchy of membership is determined by not only what they talk and write about, but how. Yet, there are many factors that can impact newcomers’ acculturation into a disciplinary community on a rhetorical level. In this article, I use positioning theory and intersectional identity to examine how Anne, a woman of color participating in undergraduate research in science, learned to read and write as a scientist and the ways her social position as a woman, person of color, and low-income and first-generation student influenced her perception and adoption of the discourse as her own. I argue that social positioning influences students’ views of scientific discourse and affects their rhetorical skill development as scientific writers. Because recognition as a group insider is heavily influenced by discourse, this research has potential implications for those interested in retention and persistence of women of color in STEM, as well as for those interested in changing learning cultures and incorporating writing instruction into disciplinary arenas.

Research suggests that student development as writers requires a supportive environment in which they receive sustained opportunities to write. However, writing researchers in general know relatively little about the actual writing opportunities embedded in students’ language arts lessons and how students’ production of texts in class is framed. The present study analyzes 178 video-recorded language arts lessons across 46 secondary classrooms in Norway based on the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observation. Specifically, we assess how often and in what situations students get an opportunity to engage in writing or are explicitly encouraged to write. We found that some writing assignments are short and fragmented, especially when students are merely recopying information from teachers’ materials. However, our analysis also provides detailed insight into how some teachers facilitate sustained, genre-focused, and process-oriented writing opportunities. These are powerful examples of successful writing instruction, and they suggest that when Norwegian language arts teachers prioritize writing, the opportunities to write are both sustained and scaffolded, the purpose of writing is explicit, and genre-specific assessment criteria are often used.

This qualitative study traces different articulations of the public, emotional honesty, and economic advantage in the literacy sponsorship of detained writer Lil’ Purp by The Beat Within, a publication for incarcerated youth and adults. Findings are compared to The Beat’s own account of Purp’s progress, revealing a set of practices reminiscent of Socratic parrhêsia that revise understanding of literacy sponsorship by expanding it to a philosophical register. Because The Beat also becomes a site of affective solidarity among detained writers in a way that resists the directional logic of writing toward civic participation, the study supports thinking about affect in public writing not as a process that moves toward political action, but rather as action in the immediate space of its utterance and reception. Such findings have implications both for public writing pedagogy and for community-based literacy scholarship.

Some literacy scholars have embraced rooted cosmopolitanism as a framework for educating in today’s globalized and pluralistic world, where communicating across difference is an important individual and societal good. But how is the “cosmopolitan turn” in writing complicated by considering the religiosity of writing teachers and student writers? Is it possible for writing instructors and student writers to stay rooted in their own faith traditions, while maintaining openness to other ethical vantage points? What new questions are raised for cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogy by these considerations? Through portraiture, we present complex pictures of how an American evangelical Christian teacher, Sam, and one of his evangelical Christian students, Charlie, engaged with a writing unit focused on “This I Believe” essay writing. The portraitures suggest that Sam, a more cosmopolitan evangelical, envisioned the unit as an invitation to (a) articulate one’s own beliefs in the wide universe of moral possibility and (b) get used to the beliefs of others who are ethically different from oneself. Charlie, on the other hand, conceptualized the unit’s writing, listening, and reading tasks as ways of honoring God and letting God speak through his literate practices. Our interpretation suggests that his populist evangelical faith made it difficult for him to openly engage in cosmopolitan dialogue across ethical difference. We hope our portraits of Sam and Charlie might move scholars interested in writing, literacy education, and rooted cosmopolitanism to engage themselves with the challenges and possibilities opened up when students’ and teachers’ religious roots are taken seriously.

Using Ivanic’s (2004) framework, the study of 20 elementary teachers examines the relationships among teachers’ beliefs about writing, their instructional practices, and contextual factors. While the district-adopted curriculum reflected specific discourses, teachers’ beliefs and practices reflected a combination of discourses. The nature of the professional development tended to reinforce particular discourses, but occasionally offered an alternative. The three cases revealed how teachers negotiated the tensions among various discourses. Beth exemplified a skills discourse, but demonstrated beliefs about writing as communication; however, she did not articulate tensions between the discourses and followed the district, skillsinfused curriculum. Amber borrowed from skills, traits, process, and genre discourses without resolving potential contradictions, resulting in instructional practices that had little coherence. Jackson, who brought in his own writing as a hip-hop artist, illustrated the social practices discourse as well as creativity and genre discourses to create an enhanced version of a district-adopted curriculum. Implications for practice include raising teacher’s awareness of the contradictory discourses that surround them.

This analysis of 83 scoring rubrics and grade definitions from writing programs at U.S. public research universities captures the current state of the struggle to define and measure specific writing traits, and it enables an induction of the underlying theoretical construct of “academic writing” present at these writing programs. Findings suggest that writing specialists have managed to permeate U.S. first-year writing assessment with certain progressive assumptions about writing and writing instruction, but they also indicate critical areas for revision, given such documents’ critical gatekeeping role at postsecondary institutions. The study also raises a broader question about the difficulties of rhetorically constructing “writing ability” in a way that is consistent with the contextualist paradigm dominant in contemporary writing studies.

The study uses Foucault's framework of governmentality to understand the impact of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) on teachers' writing instruction and attitudes toward writing in high- and low-income schools. Using interviews and observations of 18 teachers, the study identified four themes: emphasis on testing, curricular effects, awareness of lower-achieving students, and concerns for English language learners. While teachers shared concerns in those areas, there were differences in how teachers from high- and low-income schools experienced the impact of NCLB on their writing instruction. The study suggests that NCLB has affected teacher morale as well as the nature and amount of writing instruction, but that school contexts figure into teachers' instruction. The example of one teacher from a low-income school demonstrates the potential for teachers to resist the coercive aspects of NCLB through their writing instruction.

To be effective, writers must understand what knowledge they share with the audience and what they do not. Achieving this understanding is made difficult by the knowledge effect—a tendency of individuals to assume that their own knowledge is shared by others. Understanding the knowledge effect and methods for reducing it is potentially useful for understanding and teaching writing. In Study 1, we explored the impact of an individual's knowledge of technical terms on that person's ability to estimate other people's understanding of those terms. We assessed how individuals' familiarity with technical terms influenced their predictions that college freshmen and college graduates would understand those terms. Results indicate that familiarity with the meaning of technical terms leads to substantial overestimation of others' knowledge. In Study 2, we evaluated an online tutor designed to improve writers' predictions of other's word knowledge by providing them with feedback on the accuracy of their judgments.

This study charts the terrain of research on writing during the 6-year period from 1999 to 2004, asking “What are current trends and foci in research on writing?” In examining a cross-section of writing research, the authors focus on four issues: (a) What are the general problems being investigated by contemporary writing researchers? Which of the various problems dominate recent writing research, and which are not as prominent? (b) What population age groups are prominent in recent writing research? (c) What is the relationship between population age groups and problems under investigation? and (d) What methodologies are being used in research on writing? Based on a body of refereed journal articles ( n = 1,502) reporting studies about writing and composition instruction that were located using three databases, the authors characterize various lines of inquiry currently undertaken. Social context and writing practices, bi- or multi-lingualism and writing, and writing instruction are the most actively studied problems during this period, whereas writing and technologies, writing assessment and evaluation, and relationships among literacy modalities are the least studied problems. Undergraduate, adult, and other postsecondary populations are the most prominently studied population age group, whereas preschool-aged children and middle and high school students are least studied. Research on instruction within the preschool through 12th grade (P-12) age group is prominent, whereas research on genre, assessment, and bi- or multilingualism is scarce within this population. The majority of articles employ interpretive methods. This indicator of current writing research should be useful to researchers, policymakers, and funding agencies, as well as to writing teachers and teacher educators.

The introduction of seminars to university teaching marks the onset of a new teaching philosophy and practice in which writing is used to make students independent learners and researchers. Although the beginnings of writing pedagogy at American universities are well documented, little is known about its origins in Germany. The article tracks the history of seminar teaching back to its roots and reviews its historical development from the very beginnings to the point when seminars became the pedagogical flagship of the Humboldtian research university. Twenty seminar regulations from Prussian universities, written between 1812 and 1839, are reviewed with respect to the prescriptions they contain about writing. They reveal that a writing-to-learn pedagogy was elaborated as early as about 1820. The most important claim of the article is that an early concept of writing in the disciplines was central to the development of the Humboldtian research university.

Using a method of topical rhetorical analysis, inspired by K. Burke, to discuss the Ebonics debate, this article demonstrates that conversations about education, particularly writing instruction, have adopted a market rhetoric that limits teachers’ agency. However, reappropriation of this market rhetoric can help writing teachers to imagine and actuate a more empowered and long-sighted agency for themselves. Rhetorical analysis can therefore help educators to understand how local language practices shape their interaction with the rapidly changing material environment of fast capitalism.

In “Dialogic Origin,” Mikhail Bakhtin—as teacher-researcher and theorist—presents readers with a remarkable essay on teaching grammar and style to 7th-year students (roughly equivalent to 10thgraders in the U.S. educational system). In doing so, Bakhtin employs some of his most notable concepts (among them dialogism and “hero”)as informing and generative principles of writing pedagogy. Modern readers will find much to value as Bakhtin illustrates contextualized grammar instruction, defines grammar as an element of style, proposes innovative teaching methods, and advocates for theory-based pedagogy. Despite these significant similarities, the essay relies exclusively on stylistics, ignoring the demonstrable rhetorical effects of the stylistic choices illustrated in the pedagogy he outlines. In perhaps his most illuminating move, Bakhtin introduces his notion of hero directly into the language arts classroom, illustrating the concept as fundamental even to the grammar and style of language in everyday and academic (not simply literary) contexts.

This article reports on an empirical study undertaken at the University of the North, South Africa, to test personal classroom observation and anecdotal evidence about the persistent gap between writing and spoken proficiencies among learners of English as a second language. A comparative and contrastive analysis of speech samples in the study showed a significant higher proportion of morpho-syntactic nonstandard forms in the learners’ written compositions and more nonstandard discourse forms in their oral presentations. As a result, it is argued that this gap may be minimized when learners’written interlanguage variety is used productively as a means toward normative writing proficiency. Recommendations for remedial instruction in second-language writing pedagogy, within the framework of Cummins’s conversational abilities and academic language proficiency, are offered for adaptation in comparable situations.

The article explores the purpose and methods of teaching the personal narrative in foreign language classrooms. Following a cross-cultural comparison of the history, purpose, and form of autobiography in first-language contexts in the United States and Japan; a review of the place of personal narrative in second- and foreign-language compo sition theory and practice; and the results from survey research involving 160 Japanese freshman students about high school writing instruction in English, a rationale and methodology for teaching personal narrative to Japanese college students of English is presented. The five-paragraph, thesis-driven personal essay presented in English as a second language/English as a foreign language textbooks is critiqued, with recommendations for a more organic form synthesizing story and essay, as in Barrington's concept of “scene, summary and musing.” The limitations of peer editing are discussed, and the bundan writing workshop is described as an effective alternative.

Commentary: English composition as we know it began in the early nineteenth century...but why is that important? Why would we care about poorly educated grammar school pedagogues—our distant colleagues!—fingers aching with cold as they parsed sentences, heard recitations, and fed the wood stove during those long wintery terms? Very simply, because their lives, practices, and less frequently, their writings give us back ourselves. Our own problems in teaching writing have recurrently presented themselves in forms that nineteenth-century teachers easily would have recognized. Like them, we sense the ongoing need for hard basics, the primitive core of our profession. Yet like those early teachers, we also dwell within a “reform tradition” that stresses the importance of students' interests and experience and continues to see the writing task as based on what used to be called “synthetic” insights and “self-active” learning. Inspired partly by romantic educational theories from the continent, this tradition grew out of the social and educational reforms of the 1830s and 1840s and provided the basis for the early progressive teaching of the 1890s. Prominent during the 1930s, and reasserting itself powerfully in the 1960s and 1990s, this student-centered approach manifests the continuing vitality of the enlightenment ideas and values and the romantic individualism that first gave it life.

This article compares essays written in Spanish and English by bilingual writers whose prior formal academic writing instruction has been only in English. The authors describe both writers' discourse-organizational and clause-combining strategies, showing that one writer's organizational structure reflects explicit planning, whereas the other employs a more emergent organizational structure for her essays. In each case, these choices are the same for Spanish and English. Analyzing these writers' clause-combining strategies demonstrates that organizational structure at the discourse level is reflected in the types of clause combinations chosen by the writers at the sentence level, with one writer using more simple sentences and embedded clauses and the other using more hypotactic and paratactic clause combinations. The article demonstrates how clauses constitute and reflect the structure of texts and suggests that development of a repertoire of styles and discourse strategies depends on control of a variety of syntactic options.

This article presents the results of a study into revision skills of 32 elementary students in Grades 5-6 (van Gelderen & Blok, 1989). Their task consisted of improving an expository text, experimentally composed on the basis of several texts written by students of the same age as the subjects. The subjects were asked to think aloud and to give explicit evaluations, diagnoses, and suggestions for improvement of the text. Quantitative data are supplemented with a qualitative analysis of the revision activities. Reformulations and verbalizations during the process are analyzed. The analysis aims at the students' potentials for revision on the level of communicative content. Explanations based on a model of the revision process by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) are explored. This model specifies the most important cognitive steps in revision: compare, diagnose, and operate (CDO). Quantitative analysis of revision behavior showed that the subjects did possess the necessary skills to carry out each of the steps under experimental conditions designed to facilitate the revision process. The qualitative analysis, however, showed that many difficulties had yet to be overcome. The study concludes that it would be worthwhile to direct more explicit attention to further development of revision skills of primary students than is the case in current writing instruction at schools.

In this article we (a) argue that mainstream composition studies is at present too narrow in its scope and limited in its perspective and (b) offer some thoughts, from our unique interdisciplinary position, that we feel could help mainstream composition professionals improve this situation. In our article, we first provide evidence that we feel suggests an unfortunate pattern of neglect in mainstream composition studies of writing in English as a second language (ESL) and writing in languages other than English. We then introduce a number of concepts from second language studies (primarily from second language acquisition and second language writing instruction) that we believe could help mainstream composition studies address its limitations; develop a more global and inclusive understanding of writing; and thus avoid being seen as a monolinguistic, monocultural, and ethnocentric enterprise.

What sort of approach should we use to teach writing skills in today's classrooms? Many socially oriented scholars think we should teach context-specific writing skills that address the text's social milieu, whereas cognitively inclined scholars think we should teach more general models that can be adapted to a wide variety of writing contexts. As a number of composition theorists (e.g., Carter, 1990; Flower, 1994; Nystrand, 1989) have argued, a genuine synthesis between the cognitive theorists' general knowledge perspective and the social theorists' local knowledge perspective is necessary if we wish to teach students of diverse backgrounds how to write successfully in a variety of present and future contexts. This article attempts to bridge the misleading dichotomy between local knowledge and general knowledge by applying what cognitive psychologists have discovered about memory, expertise, and the transfer-of-learning to the question of appropriate composition pedagogy.

The authors assessed writing attitudes and epistemologies of 117 first-year and 329 upper-level undergraduates. Attitude scales assessed enjoyment of writing, self-ratings of writing ability, and belief in writing as learnable. Epistemological scales measured absolutism (belief in knowledge as determinably true or false), relativism (belief in the indeterminacy of all claims), and evaluativism (belief that truth can be approximated). Absolutism correlated negatively with writing grades and verbal aptitude, whereas evaluativism exhibited a weak positive correlation with both. Students with higher evaluativism tended to enjoy writing more and to assess themselves as good writers. Upper-level students were less absolutist and marginally more evaluativist than first-year students. Differences in attitudes and epistemologies emerged between men and women and among upper-level students in four disciplinary groups. The authors sketch some implications for writing pedagogy.

Based on a year-long ethnographic study, this article presents a case study of a fourth-grade student, Kenya, who learned to participate in the literacy community of her classroom—in her terms “to be good”—by writing letters. It was through these letters, which began as daily written interactions about (mis)behavior, that Kenya gained confidence and skill as a writer. The genre of letters allowed Kenya to construct her identity as a writer in the classroom community, at the same time that she retained her identity as a member of a group of four, frequently defiant African American girls. In this classroom, teachers used writing to forge collaborative relationships with students—relationships that often were built around struggle and conflict—to encourage students' growth as writers. This study has implications for a new pedagogy of writing, one that provides a rich and challenging curriculum for all students, even those who might in other circumstances be considered “remedial,” and one which alters our conceptions of the roles of and relationships between teachers and students in a writing classroom.

This study proceeds from the assumption that computers do not function as independent variables in classrooms, but rather as part of a complex network of social and pedagogical interactions. It examines the integration of computers into the writing practices of a remedial English class in an urban high school. Computers and word processors were introduced midway into the school year. The class was observed and recorded daily throughout the academic year, and all written work was collected. Six students were selected for in-depth focus as they carried out writing tasks. Analysis focuses on how classroom writing practices were structured and carried out and how students participated in writing tasks before and after the computers arrived. Although many changes accompanied the use of computers, the study concludes that the teacher's structuring of writing instruction had the greatest impact on both student writing and the ways computers entered into that writing.

This essay situates the phenomenon of writing and learning in historical, pedagogical, and theoretical frameworks to isolate write-to-learn methods derived from the “British model” of language and learning. Writing as a mode of learning has maintained its status partly because of the rise of rhetoric and composition as a specialized field and because cross-curricular writing instruction has been offered as one answer to alleged “crises” of literate standards and competence in public and higher education. Generally, the author claims that typical accounts of writing as a unique tool for promoting learning ignore the complexities of cultures, classrooms, assignments, and other media that might equally facilitate learning. The author's reading of 35 studies of writing and learning is that they do not provide the long-sought empirical validation of writing as a mode of learning. He argues that this research is grounded in the same assumptions about language and learning as are common in the lore and practice of “writing across the curriculum” (WAC) and writing process approaches, and as a result, the issue of writing and learning has been framed wrongly. The confounds within this body of research are many of the cognitive and situational variables that would support a model of writing and learning that is compatible with the diverse discourses and experiences within and across institutions.

The style of discourse underlying writing instruction in this country, which has been termed essayist literacy by Scollon and Scollon and others, is grounded historically and culturally in the development of Western civilization. This style of discourse is the register of English used in academic situations, and it also has been found to be characteristic of some educated (especially male) mainstream speakers in other contexts. Because this register often differs from the naturally acquired discourse styles of students from nonmainstream groups, many such students face difficulties in writing instruction that mainstream students do not face. Given the importance of the essayist literacy register in this society, it is important (a) to make the characteristics of this discourse style explicit in order to increase the likelihood that writing instruction will be clear and available to all students, and (b) to learn about other discourse styles that are already known and used by students from a range of communities. A conceptual framework from the ethnography of communication is presented for studying verbal performances in different cultural contexts, and two examples of persuasive oral performances from ongoing research among Mexican immigrants are analyzed within this framework.

Most commentators on writing instruction—both its history and its present practice—focus on American examples, at least in part because of a lack of information about how other countries organize writing instruction. This article seeks to redress this situation by providing information about how Canadian universities organize writing instruction. The article presents a short orientation to the development of universities in Canada before presenting the results of a national survey of all the universities in Canada who belong to the Association of Universities and Colleges in Canada. The Results and Discussion section is divided into two parts based on the language of instruction in the universities being considered (English or French). The discussion seeks to answer three questions: How widespread is writing instruction? What do we know about the people who teach and research writing at universities? What is the range of instruction?

The almost exclusive reliance on evidence developed from documentary analyses, specifically analyses of textbooks, in composition historiography has resulted in an agonistic, heroes-and-villains image of the history of writing instruction, whereby modern composition scholars have defined themselves in terms of their opposition to what has come to be called “current-traditional rhetoric.” This article promotes the use of oral evidence in composition historiography to guard against overgeneralization and simplistic reduction of composition history to binary oppositions. Oral interviews also can serve as a way of collecting information that would otherwise be lost, of exploring the thoughts, motivations, feelings, and values of informants, and of giving voice to those marginalized politically, socially, and professionally. This article also defends oral data against positivistic attacks on its reliability as evidence and argues that the evidentiary value of any piece of historical data depends not on some abstract ranking of different kinds of evidence but on the historian's understanding of the rhetorical context informing the production of that data.

A“cognitive discourse analysis” was employed to analyze instructions for using a word processor written by eighth-grade students. The approach analyzes text structure in order to specify underlying semantic and conceptual knowledge structures. Our analyses revealed that the written instructions produced by the student writers were deficient in providing a reader with the information necessary for performing the task in two distinct ways. First, the group of students as a whole presented insufficient content information in their texts, particularly with respect to the subprocedures required to use the word processor. Second, the organization of students' texts did not parallel the hierarchical structure of the procedures described. These results suggest the importance of looking at writing from the point of view of the knowledge structures being expressed.

This article takes the position that teaching writing effectively to diverse students of non-English background will require an examination of existing views about the nature of writing and a critical evaluation of the profession's ability to work with bilingual individuals of different types. In order to explain this view, the article is divided into three parts. Part 1 describes the nature of bilingualism, identifies the population of students who can be classified as American bilingual minorities, and suggests that existing compartmentalization within the composition profession cannot address the needs of this particular population. Part 2 of the article reviews trends in current scholarship in second-language writing and points out that most of this research has focused on ESL students rather than on fluent/functional bilinguals. Finally, Part 3 lists and discusses a number of research directions in which the involvement and participation of mainstream scholars would be most valuable. In presenting an outline of questions and issues fundamental to developing effective pedagogical approaches for teaching writing to bilingual minority students, this final section argues that involvement in research on non-English-background populations of researchers who generally concentrate on mainstream issues would do much to break down the compartmentalization now existing within the English composition profession. It further argues that by using bilingual individuals to study questions of major theoretical interest, the profession will strengthen the explanatory power of existing theories about the process and practice of writing in general.

To understand the ways that teachers adapt writing instruction to a microcomputer classroom, the researchers observed and recorded activities minute-by-minute in four classes for a full semester of introductory composition. Two experienced teachers each taught two classes: one traditional class and one class that met for half of its time in a microcomputer classroom. This report contrasts their classes, calling attention to (a) the time pressures created by teaching with computers, (b) issues in training students to be proficient at word processing and revising, (c) ways a microcomputer classroom can foster workshop approaches to teaching writing, (d) the need for carefully structured classroom activities, and (e) the importance of teachers sharing with students common values for learning with computers in a group setting.

Occasional dissent notwithstanding, “expository” prose—usually conceived as depersonalized and decontextualized—continues to be the main focus of most writing instruction at the secondary and college levels. This article critically examines the opposition of objectified exposition and personal narrative posited by rhetorical tradition and maintained by most composition texts and syllabi today. The liveliness of recent cross-disciplinary discussions regarding the narrative as a uniquely rich mode of thought and discourse contrasts rather sharply with the negative and often impoverished assumptions about storied prose held by most composition theorists and teachers. Unsupported by empirical evidence, such assumptions reflect a cultural bias that prefers abstractions to stories and fails to grasp their dynamic interplay. Where writing instruction is concerned, narrative and exposition are best perceived as poles of a dialectic, with personal experience informing one's interest in abstract knowledge beyond the self, the understanding self becoming enlarged as it “takes in” what is “out there.” The best thinking and writing, it is argued, are at once personal and public, both infused with private meaning and focused upon the world beyond the self.

At least seven types of summaries have emerged in common usage, especially during the past 250 years. They may be classified as either sequential summaries that retain the original order in which information was presented or synthesizing summaries that alter this sequence to achieve specific objectives. Each type of summary developed in response to challenges facing professions, government, business, and ordinary citizens-all of whom have sought to absorb increasing quantities of information being generated in a society that is becoming more complex. This taxonomy offers a definition and brief history for each of the seven techniques, describes the growth of corporations or other organizations that can be considered leading practitioners, and comments on the potential continuing role for each type of summary. The article also focuses on several contemporary issues that will affect future research, classroom writing instruction, and information management in modern computerized offices.

Schools should be instructing students in formal thought and expression—what we call “comprehending”—rather than in everyday or “home” thought and language—what we call “understanding.” In this essay we suggest general changes in the standard reading and writing curricula. Finally, we examine the language of writing instruction, in college-level individual writing conferences, to take a close look at issues involved in implementing the curricula for higher and lower achieving students.