• Year 7 students can learn to code engaging animated narratives with basic Scratch. • English teachers can learn to sufficient coding to support students coding stories. • Student animated narratives of 2 – 3 min can meet English curricula requirements. • Student multimodality use can be evaluated using a criterion-based framework. • Student coding proficiency can be extended through coding animated narratives. Coding animated stories in the English classroom has been advocated from over a decade ago as an integrated curriculum context for early teaching of computer programming while simultaneously developing students’ multimodal narrative authoring. However, related research has not adequately addressed English curriculum requirements for narrative creation. This article describes the development of a framework for analysing coded animated stories from the perspective of English curriculum expectations. Analysis of 23 stories showed substantial variation in the emphasis given to different multimodal resources among those stories with the most extensive use of such resources. Stories with limited use of these resources excluded those expressing characters’ emotions and positioning the audience to experience the story from a variety of points of view. Stories with extensive multimodal expression were at the upper, but not necessarily highest, coding proficiency levels, while some with high coding proficiency showed limited use of multimodal resources. Implications are drawn for coding as an engaging creative tool in English classrooms.

• Generative AI can help multilingual communicators in professional writing. • Generative AI supports email/report writing and meeting summary. • Practical, ethical and legal concerns remain. • Students’ AI use at workplace informs academic writing teaching and learning. Because multilingual students’ languaging practices are not limited to academic settings, it is important to explore their lived experiences communicating in real-world situations to shed light on how to prepare them in college classrooms in the era of generative AI. Drawing upon writing samples, artifacts and interview data, this case study brings attention to the potential and challenges a multilingual international student face in implementing generative AI-assisted written communication during her 5-month internship in the workplace. The findings indicate that generative AI tools, especially ChatGPT, have the potential to help multilingual communicators meet their written linguistic demands in professional contexts, especially in email writing, report drafting and meeting summary. Generative AI-assisted writing tools could assist multilingual students with idea expression and boost their confidence and agency in communication. Yet, despite its many advantages, practical, ethical and legal concerns remain. This study contributes to the scarce yet budding literature exploring multilingual international students’ AI engagement in professional settings and offers concrete pedagogical implications and directions for future research.

This article presents a curated collection of six teaching innovations presented at the Association for Business Communication 90th conference in Long Beach, California, as well as online, in October 2025. These MFA presenters demonstrated activities in helping students understand the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and social media in business communication. This My Favorite Assignment 34th edition introduces readers to a variety of classroom-ready ideas that integrate tasks involving social media and AI. Teaching support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, rubrics, frequently asked questions, links, and sample student projects—are downloadable from the Association for Business Communication website.

Organizations increasingly recognize web accessibility as both necessary and beneficial for legal, ethical, and economic reasons. This article shows how instructors can easily integrate accessible web design into an introductory web design and development course for business students who have limited experience with design theory and user interface design. By applying testable criteria, following industry-standard guidelines, and using online tools, these business students can successfully build websites that individuals with visual, hearing, cognitive, or motor-control disabilities can use. The authors present their approach, describe specific assignments, and provide suggestions for incorporating accessibility into a traditional introductory web development course.

Nurturing the ability to argue is of great importance in science education, despite students often encountering cognitive and emotional barriers. The aim of this study was to examine the quality of argumentation and the issues raised by secondary school students when they are asked to respond to structured argumentation tasks. We chose topics from two different socio-scientific issues of varied perceived relevance to students’ daily lives: the sale of fast food in school canteens (Group 1) and the addition of antibiotics in animal feed (Group 2). The study involved 249 high school students aged 14–16, in Poland. A total of 139 participants took part in an intervention about fast food, and 110 in an intervention about the use of antibiotics. Data were collected in the form of written arguments developed by students as part of a structured teaching intervention. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to process and analyze the data. On average, students’ arguments scored higher on the topic of antibiotic use on animal feed. Qualitative content analysis of the students’ arguments identified four thematic groups: (1) personal aspects revealing personal meanings, values, and defence mechanisms; (2) scientific aspects revealing substantive knowledge; (3) socio-cultural aspects revealing economic, sociological or cultural aspects; (4) nonsensical or incoherent arguments. A topic related to students’ personal decisions and perceived to be closest to their lives and daily experience (eating fast food in the school canteen) more often prompted arguments indicating cognitive defence, by denying the harmfulness of fast food and emphasizing possible advantages or appealing to the right to choose. Based on this finding, we discuss the need for defence mechanisms to be considered in pedagogical designs for the teaching of argumentation.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Background:</i></b> Hospital educators are designated individuals who provide hospitalized K-12 children with their schooling during the time of their stay. They play a vital role in maintaining educational continuity for hospitalized children, yet their professional information and communication practices remain understudied in US settings. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Literature review:</i></b> We build on literature within technical and professional communication (TPC), specifically scholars who have studied technology and health in understanding US hospital educators' unique technological needs and communication practices within highly regulated healthcare environments. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Research questions:</i></b> How do hospital educators navigate professional communication, adapt teaching practices to meet diverse student needs, and utilize technology in hospital settings? What opportunities exist for artificial-intelligence (AI) integration? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Research method:</i></b> We conducted semistructured interviews with four hospital educators across US hospitals, applying reflexive thematic analysis, informed by Participatory Communication Theory, Sociotechnical Systems Perspectives, and Knowledge Justice. Analysis employed iterative open coding followed by theory-informed thematic development, where communication theory guided the identification of dialogical patterns, systems theory directed attention to sociotechnical interactions, and knowledge justice sensitized us to power dynamics affecting professional knowledge access and sharing. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Results/discussion:</i></b> Findings reveal characteristics of US hospital education contexts in our study: short patient stays, strict security requirements, institutional variability across hospital settings, and emphasis on engagement over assessment. Educators demonstrate remarkable adaptability in coordinating among stakeholders while navigating institutional constraints and developing strategies for rapid assessment and flexible instruction. While educational technologies offer benefits, implementation faces significant challenges regarding security, practical limitations, and offline functionality needs. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Conclusion:</i></b> We propose guideline themes for developing information and communication technologies–including some that use AI–that support hospital educators' professional needs while respecting hospital setting constraints. This research contributes to understanding how technologies can enhance hospital education while highlighting the importance of context-specific design that empowers rather than replaces educator expertise.

This article presents a curated collection of nine teaching innovations presented at the Association for Business Communication 90th conference in Long Beach, California, as well as online, in October 2025. These My Favorite Assignment (MFA) presenters demonstrated various activities in helping students prepare for their careers and develop their professional skills. This My Favorite Assignment 33rd edition introduces readers to a wide variety of classroom-ready ideas that integrate career readiness tasks. Teaching support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, rubrics, frequently asked questions, links, and sample student projects—are downloadable from the Association for Business Communication website.

This article presents critical positive communication pedagogy (CPCP), which synthesizes the fields of critical pedagogy and positive communication pedagogy to promote positive communication practices that develop a social justice sensibility among students. We argue that CPCP contributes to the creation of learner-centered classrooms that promote interpersonal connection, foster feelings of inclusion and belonging, and aid students in achieving sustainable happiness. We provide examples of CPCP in business and professional communication classrooms to promote diversity and inclusion, specifically related to issues of gender and sexuality, race, disability, and class.

Positive communication is crucial for effective teaching, influencing student engagement, motivation, and educational outcomes. Synthesizing educational and interdisciplinary literature, this article develops two core propositions: (1) cultivating classroom relationships through responsive interactions and peer connectedness, and (2) strengthening teacher affirmation and credibility via authentic and empathetic communication practices. Specific strategies, such as personalized feedback, inclusive communication methods, structured confirmation behaviors, and generationally responsive techniques, equip educators to enhance classroom environments, improve student learning experiences, and prepare students effectively for academic achievement and professional collaboration.

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 hegemony of English, or at least a particular form of English, has been robustly critiqued, yet is far from having been abandoned in teaching.[1] In addition, dominant discourse deems Native American languages “extinct” or otherwise incapable of speaking to academic topics. However, Indigenous peoples develop language for various subject areas, and languages are used in ways that represent the cultural perspectives of their users.[2] Such perspectives are part of the heart of Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty, and the right to use Indigenous languages supports, quite simply, Indigenous peoples’ right to speak and think.[3] Declining to accept assignments in an Indigenous or any heritage language (or requiring translations) conveys the message that English is needed in academic contexts, and is therefore communicatively superior. I argue that writing courses should support student refusals of translation, creating a situation where an instructor may not know what the content of a student submission even is, and that this inability “to know” serves the aims of decolonization.&nbsp;&nbsp; [1] Alim &amp; Smitherman 2012 [2] See: Kimura &amp; Counceller 2009, McCarty &amp; Nicholas 2014, Wilson &amp; Kamanā 2011, Reyhner 2010, McIvor &amp; McCarty 2017 [3] These rights are a main tenet of how Leonard (2008, 2011, 2021) theorizes language reclamation

This Research Brief presents an overview of current research in community-engaged writing, particularly foregrounding the importance of praxis-oriented and collaborative approaches. Here, we articulate collaboration, reciprocity, and accountability as some of the main tenets of community-engaged writing, and we showcase the variety of projects that such work can include (from local food writing to prison literacy work to transnational social justice movements and beyond). Then, we explore some of the methods and methodologies that are central in this scholarship, drawing on examples that engage storytelling, oral history and interview methods, archival methods, ethnographic research, and even public performances and workshops. We conclude with a discussion of future possibilities for research, teaching, and the imperative to see community-engaged work as part of scholarly work in tenure, promotion, and review.

This article describes a gamified technical writing assignment inspired by the Hunt a Killer board games. Students solve a fictional mystery by analyzing AI-generated technical documents as an introduction to the most common deliverables and genres in the field and practice of Technical and Professional Communication. Grounded in research on gamification and AI, this activity fosters experiential learning by situating technical writing genres as both structured and dynamic tools. By combining genre analysis with collaborative problem-solving, the assignment offers a novel approach to teaching genre in technical writing, emphasizing flexibility and critical thinking.

This essay shares a WAW reflection assignment that supports the development of writing knowledge for tax memos and for the accounting profession; it is taught in an undergraduate tax class for accounting students. Students develop an external tax memo and, following submission of that assignment, they write about their own writing in their completed memo. The emphasis on the WAW reflection is paragraphing, as this aspect of writing is highly valued in accounting and especially needed for an effective tax memo. Accounting education has long called for more writing-emphasis instruction in accounting courses, and this assignment answers that call.

The study highlights the crucial role of professional social media and LinkedIn instruction for students seeking employment. An analysis of 20 business and technical communication textbooks identifies significant gaps between textbook guidance and real-world expectations. Some textbooks in both fields fall short in offering actionable strategies for creating and maintaining a professional social media presence. While many textbooks emphasize the importance of social media or LinkedIn, most fail to provide concrete examples or best practices, such as keyword optimization for AI, effective networking strategies, and best practices for posting content. Grounded in digital literacy theory and professional identity formation, the study provides teaching recommendations, including the identification and adoption of supplemental materials to teach professional social media usage.

This article explores factors influencing classroom assessment approaches by analyzing survey data from 326 U.S. college instructors teaching business, communication, and composition. Business and communication instructors adopt nontraditional grading methods far less than composition instructors. Departmental culture and disciplinary norms are major influences, along with constraints like class size, time, and technology. The article argues that instructors can and should question departmental grading norms to develop assessment methods that enhance learning in interdisciplinary courses like business communication.

This mixed-methods study investigates the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) among Bangladeshi university students through the creation of online advertisements for products like tea, kettles, and mango drinks. Grounded in the frameworks of Ertay and Gilanlioglu’s multidimensional ICC scale, Kress and van Leeuwen’s social semiotics, and Dooly’s asynchronous interculturality, the research examines how student-made ads serve as cultural texts that manifest evolving ICC. Quantitative results from 90 participants revealed significant disparities in self-assessed ICC, with Attitude scoring highest (71%) and Awareness lowest (54%). Longitudinal analysis of 60 students showed Language Appropriateness improved most (37%, p  &lt; 0.01), while Visual Cultural Cues showed minimal gains (18%, p  = 0.08), indicating a cultural bias in visual literacy development. Pedagogically, advertisement creation supported by a structured ICC rubric yielded significantly higher competence gains (29%) than case studies or ad creation alone. Qualitative findings illuminated the challenges students faced in negotiating “glocal” identities and the emotional labor of cultural mediation. The study concludes that student-generated advertisements are potent pedagogical artifacts for ICC development but require tailored, critically reflective scaffolding to address contextual biases and effectively prepare students for the demands of global digital business communication.

This article examines the notion of “secure-base relationships” in kindergartens. While this concept originally emphasized early emotional bonds between parents and children, recent developments in attachment theory highlight its interconnectedness with social relationships. However, the dichotomy between a secure base and exploration remains prevalent in the literature. Adopting a practice-based approach informed by rhetorical listening, we analyse kindergarten teachers’ descriptions of exploratory processes with children. Examples from two phases of a project on the theme of the universe are discussed in light of the concepts of ethos and habitual places. Findings suggest that secure-base relationships in kindergartens are closely interwoven with exploration, forming a polyvocal and dynamic place that involves choice and risk. Embodied interactions in familiar activities are shown to support relationships, and alternating positions in play emerges as a beneficial pedagogical strategy to support a culture of sharing. Finally, the relevance of a civic notion of ethos for kindergarten communities is underscored.

Abstract: This paper examines the reception of the pseudo-Quintilianic Declamationes maiores in the 14th and 15th centuries, highlighting in particular the important role of Lorenzo Valla's Elegantie lingue Latine as a medium for humanistic engagement with these rhetorical texts. Calderini, teaching at the Studium of Rome, used the Declamationes maiores as a study text, demonstrating a practical application of these declamations in the context of humanist pedagogy. Poliziano, on the other hand, although he did not engage directly with the Declamationes maiores , still occasionally cited the controversiae in his commentaries. Together, these examples illustrate that, for humanists of the late fifteenth century, access to, understanding of, and engagement with the Declamationes maiores were often mediated by Valla's Elegantie , which served as a conduit for their interpretative practices and as a source for quotations.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in writing assessment, particularly for automated essay scoring (AES) and for generating formative feedback within automated writing evaluation (AWE). While AI-driven AES enhances efficiency and consistency, concerns regarding accuracy, bias, and ethical implications raise critical questions about its role in assessment. This paper examines the impact of generative AI on teacher agency through an ecological perspective, which considers agency as shaped by personal, institutional, and sociocultural factors. The analysis highlights the need for teachers to critically mediate AI-generated scores and feedback to align them with pedagogical goals, ensuring AI functions as an assistive tool rather than a determinant of assessment outcomes. Although AI can streamline assessment, over-reliance risks diminishing teachers’ evaluative expertise and reinforcing biases embedded in AI systems. Ethical concerns, including transparency, data privacy, and fairness, further complicate its adoption. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a framework for responsible AI integration that prioritizes bias mitigation, data security, and teacher-driven decision-making. The discussion concludes with pedagogical implications and directions for future research on AI-assisted writing assessment. • Teachers can actively mediate AI-generated scores to maintain agency. • Dependence on AES may weaken teachers’ evaluative skills. • Bias, data privacy, and AI opacity can undermine teachers’ decision-making. • AI literacy and hybrid assessment models can promote teacher autonomy. • A framework for protecting teacher agency in generative AI–based AWE is presented.

While existing research on second or foreign (L2) feedback has predominantly focused on the effectiveness of various feedback practices and their impacts on writing performance, limited attention has been devoted to learners’ proactive role in seeking feedback, and how this important yet underexplored construct correlates with conative and affective variables remains insufficiently examined. To help fill that void, we sought to explore the concept of feedback-seeking behavior and its antecedents in L2 writing by examining the correlations with future L2 writing selves and emotions, particularly unpacking the mediating effect of emotions in the emotion-driven chain of “motivation→emotion→increased or decreased behavior” among 225 undergraduate English major students. Structural equation modeling unveiled that ideal and ought-to L2 writing selves directly and significantly influenced emotions, and emotions impacted the two dimensions of feedback-seeking behavior significantly. More importantly, ideal L2 writing self indirectly influenced feedback monitoring and feedback inquiry through the mediation of writing enjoyment. Nevertheless, writing boredom exercised no significant mediating effect on future L2 selves and feedback-seeking behavior. These findings reinforced the learner-centered perspective that positions students as proactive agents and provide some notable implications for L2 writing instruction to advance our understanding of teacher feedback. • Learners with heightened L2 selves deployed more feedback-seeking strategies. • Experiencing L2 enjoyment fostered distinct feedback-seeking behaviors. • No variations in L2 boredom existed in the link between L2 selves and behavior. • More high-quality research evaluating L2 learners as proactive agents is needed.

Peer evaluation is widely recognized for its educational benefits; however, its reliability and validity, particularly among adolescent second-language (L2) writers at the early stages of English language and literacy development, remain insufficiently explored. This explanatory sequential mixed-methods study investigated the reliability and validity of peer evaluation in English argumentative writing among 35 Grade 10 and 37 Grade 12 students from a public high school in Beijing, China. Twelve of the participating students (six at each grade) were interviewed about the validity, reliability, and value of peer evaluation. The findings indicated that peer evaluations demonstrated high levels of reliability and validity, with peer-assessed writing scores closely aligning with inter-teacher assessments. Notably, variations were observed among Grade 10 students, particularly in the evaluation of lower-order writing skills, such as grammar and vocabulary, which exhibited reduced validity. These results underscore the potential of peer evaluation in assessing higher-order content-level writing across varying levels of L2 English writing proficiency. The study also highlights areas where adolescent L2 writers may require additional support to enhance the effectiveness of peer evaluation practices in English argumentative writing. Implications for improving English argumentative writing instruction and refining peer evaluation strategies in high school L2 English classrooms are discussed. • Peer evaluation shows high reliability, similar to inter-teacher rating. • Peer evaluation works well for higher-order skills in L2 argumentative writing. • 10th graders struggled with evaluating lower-order skills like grammar. • 12th graders evaluate lower- and higher-order skills with greater validity than 10th graders.

As a key attribute of effective writing, coherence remains challenging to teach in language classrooms, with traditional writing instruction frequently overlooking coherence in favor of discrete, rule-based features. This mixed-methods study investigates the effectiveness of explicit coherence instruction on English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) students’ performance on integrated writing tasks. The study employed a controlled experimental design with 64 upper-intermediate-level undergraduate students at a Chinese university, drawing on Hasan’s Cohesive Harmony theory as the theoretical framework. Half of the participants (n = 32) in the experimental group received explicit instruction on coherence with a focus on cohesive chains and cohesive devices in integrated writing, while the control group (n = 32) received standard paraphrasing instruction. Quantitative analysis revealed that the experimental group showed significant improvements in coherence scores and multiple cohesive chain measures. Qualitative discourse analysis of six students’ writing samples from the experimental group demonstrated varying levels of improvement in writing coherence, with high-performing students showing better use of identity chains and pronoun references. The findings revealed that explicit instruction on coherence significantly improved students’ performance in creating coherent integrated writing, particularly through the development of cohesive chains and appropriate use of cohesive devices. This study underscores the pedagogical value of teaching coherence to enhance writing quality and provides concrete strategies for developing more effective teaching approaches for integrated writing tasks in EFL contexts. • The study examined 64 Chinese EFL students using mixed-methods experimental design. • Cohesive Harmony theory served as the framework for assessing writing coherence. • Explicit instruction significantly improved coherence in integrated writing tasks. • High-performing students demonstrated superior identity chain development.

Abstract When teaching in neighboring fields such as creative writing and writing studies, instructors can draw on the explicit recommendations of professional organizations and an existing scholarly consensus about threshold concepts. However, the struggle to define what exactly it is we teach when we are teaching literary studies continues. Rather than advocating for transferable skills in deference to the neoliberal marketplace, we should spend more time explaining to ourselves and to our students the particular practices, habits, and concerns that distinguish literary studies as a valuable scholarly discipline. Metacognition is essential for students to learn, and this can be facilitated more effectively by instructors able to articulate how the methods and goals of a course are informed by disciplinary norms, especially the ubiquitous and yet continually contested practice of close reading. This article reviews both recent scholarship and pedagogical resources on close reading to identify the intertwined challenges of defining and teaching this disciplinary method, making recommendations for more effective classroom practices.

Abstract This article argues that care — especially care grounded in Black feminist traditions — is not an affective supplement to teaching but rather the radical foundation of liberatory pedagogy. Amid rising attacks on critical education and the austerity logics of the neoliberal university, the authors theorize care as infrastructure, method, and resistance. Drawing from the work of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Mia Mingus, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, they offer a framework for care-centered teaching that foregrounds mutuality, trust, and collective accountability. Through vignettes, student reflections, and practices such as trauma-informed design, mutual aid, and collaborative assessment, the article demonstrates how care fosters relational transformation and deep intellectual engagement. It also interrogates the structural devaluation of care labor, particularly for women and faculty of color, and challenges dominant educational paradigms that equate rigor with detachment. As one student reflected, “You believed me when I said I needed more time, without asking for proof. That made me want to do the work even more.” Drawing from their institutional experiences, the authors position teaching as a form of organizing — an insurgent, relational practice that refuses extractive academic norms while building collective conditions for educational and institutional transformation.

Bridget C. Donnelly is an assistant professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. Her primary teaching areas include eighteenth-century British literature, the novel, and Gothic and horror literature. Her research has appeared in Philosophy and Literature, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, and The Literary Taylor Swift: Songwriting and Intertextuality (2024). She is completing, along with a team of undergraduate and graduate student researchers, a critical edition of Elizabeth Meeke's 1796 The Abbey of Clugny, under contract with Routledge's Chawton House: Women's Novel Series.Kishonna Gray (she/her) is a professor of racial justice and technology in the School of Information at the University of Michigan and director of the Mellon-funded Intersectional Tech Lab. Her research explores the intersections of race, gender, and digital technologies, particularly in gaming and platform culture. She is the author of Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming and Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live and coeditor of Woke Gaming and Feminism in Play. Gray is also a faculty associate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.Ashley Nadeau is an associate professor of English at Utah Valley University in Orem, UT, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century British literature and critical theory. Her current research project examines the role of audiobooks in undergraduate literary studies and studies on the Victorian novel. When not thinking about audiobooks, she studies the relationship between the social and architectural histories of built public space and the Victorian literary imagination. Her work has appeared in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorians Journal, The Gaskell Journal, Modern Language Studies, and Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom.Eleanor Reeds is an associate professor of English at Hastings College in Nebraska where she enjoys teaching across genres and periods in a small but vibrant department. Her research has appeared in venues such as Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Victorian Poetry, American Literary Realism, and Twentieth-Century Literature.Tes Schaeffer (she/her) previously served as an advanced lecturer in Stanford's Program in Writing and Rhetoric and as the associate director of the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Central Oregon Community College. Her fields of scholarship include composition and reading pedagogies, affect studies, and phenomenology.Krysten Stein (she/her) is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College. She is a research affiliate with the Intersectional Tech Lab at the University of Michigan's School of Information and the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. Her research explores reality television and social media, with a focus on identity, political economy, and wellness. She is completing her first book, And How Does That Make You Feel? Theratainment and the Digital Commodification of Mental Health, and is a cofounding member of the Content Creator Scholars Network.Lisa Swan is an advanced lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. She holds a PhD in curriculum and instruction with a specialization in English education from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests include writing studies, pedagogy, reading, teacher training, and equity.

Abstract This article describes a project taught in a British literature survey course, in which students navigate digital archives like Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) to find a “companion piece” to a literary text. The essay shares the goals of the research project, the assignment design, and specific successes and challenges students encounter. The piece additionally offers reflections about teaching the conventional British literature survey course for undergraduate English majors, particularly considering the ways in which digital archives and historicist methodologies can expand students’ understanding of literary canons and the interrelationship between literature and history.

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.

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.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Background:</i></b> Practitioners, academics, and accrediting boards all recognize the importance of communication to the work of engineers, but ensuring that engineering students graduate with effective communication skills continues to be a challenge for programs. Our project examines this problem within our institutional context, with the goal of serving local needs while extending the literature on engineering communication. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Literature review:</i></b> Prior research identifies communication skill gaps, examines the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching engineering communication, and highlights issues of knowledge transfer. Few studies collect both academic and practitioner perspectives. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Research questions:</i></b> 1. How effectively does the required first-year course provide students with foundational engineering communication skills? 2. How much do students’ communication abilities improve by the time they complete the engineering capstone course in their final semester? 3. To what extent are engineering students graduating with the communication skills they will need to succeed professionally? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Research methodology:</i></b> This study involved technical and professional communication instructors’ analysis of student communication work from two courses: 1. first-year engineering communication and 2. the engineering capstone. The study also included surveys of and follow-up interviews with engineering practitioners regarding the communication skills of capstone students and recent engineering graduates more generally. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Results:</i></b> Student work from the first-year engineering communication course was weak; communication work from the capstone was not substantially stronger, even though students were provided with a detailed template for each assignment. The survey and interviews suggest that practitioners tended to view capstone students’ communication skills favorably but found the skills of new hires who were recent graduates to be weaker. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Conclusions:</i></b> The data emphasize the shortcomings of stand-alone communication courses, issues with knowledge transfer, and the role of institutional contexts.

This article makes a case for the importance of integrating public writing pedagogy in and beyond second language (L2) writing classrooms. Public writing is defined as a situated, distributed act of engaging public audiences through writing, with various semiotic resources and modalities, to make meaning, connect, and bring about social change. L2 writers practice public writing deliberately or unwittingly, for various personal or political purposes, and within various discursive contexts. However, such practices are underresearched, undertheorized, and underdiscussed in L2 writing classrooms, which could be partially ascribed to the disciplinary disposition of the field L2 writing and to the ethical concerns regarding cultural assimilation. The article begins by contextualizing the definitions of public writing in relation to L2 writing. It then explains why it is important to discuss public writing in an L2 writing classroom and consider public writing a legitimate L2 writing issue while acknowledging the pedagogical resistance. In particular, the article highlights the decolonial potential of practicing public writing in an L2. In the final section, the article offers pedagogical guidelines and a graphic framework concerning the “where” and “how” of teaching public writing in an L2.

Using both a Bakhtinian and a collaborative writing framework, in this qualitative study, we sought to understand writing practices in one elementary school. Through observations in three classrooms and interviews with students, the study found that students had opportunities to engage in a variety of collaborative writing activities, including supportive contributions and co-constructing a text. When engaging in supportive contributions, students inspired, assisted, or shared their work with peers. In collaborations of a single text, students who had experiences writing with one another negotiated ideas and texts successfully. In pairs where students experienced conflict, there tended to be fewer collaborative moments, and students sought help from the teacher. The study demonstrates that students’ relationships with one another play a significant role in collaborative writing practices and highlights the important role of friendships in successful interactions.

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

Composing with AI provides research about the rise of generative AI in composition studies, focusing on histories, policies, reports of classroom and student use, multimodal composing and teaching AI literacies.

Businesses increasingly use Artificial Intelligence (AI) Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to screen job applicants’ résumés. A summative content analysis auditing how 18 business communication, business English, and technical communication textbooks cover résumés and AI ATS found a lack of consensus. The study identified the challenge of offering specific advice on emerging AI technology in textbooks. The article recommends writing and teaching practice changes when discussing emerging technology and creating or using textbook content.

Self-reflection is expected in business communication teaching, but e-learning has been argued to create an illusion of direct experience as social presence. This study explores how participants’ negotiation of personal agency is constructed in a digital, asynchronic context. Using data collected from a digital classroom of a European business university, I show how participants enact specific strategies in their presentation of self. My aim is twofold: first, to explore how participants negotiate their social identities in a virtual community, and second, to better understand what both educators and enterprise can do to encourage successful dialogue and further humanize digital context.

This article presents a curated collection of 11 teaching innovations presented at the Association for Business Communication 89th conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as well as online, in October 2024. These MFA presenters demonstrated teaching ideas specifically on improving students’ skills in working in groups. This My Favorite Assignment 32nd edition introduces readers to these classroom approaches in teaching skills involving group dynamics in business contexts. Teaching support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, rubrics, frequently asked questions, links, and sample student projects—are downloadable from the Association for Business Communication website.

This article examines how artificial intelligence is transforming instructor-student communication and student evaluation in higher education. By comparing traditional and AI-mediated communication practices, the study synthesizes current literature on opportunities, challenges, and ethical considerations. The analysis highlights the need for digital literacy, emotionally intelligent AI tools, and balanced pedagogical strategies. Practical and theoretical propositions are provided to guide educators in leveraging AI while preserving human-centered teaching values.

Cross-institutional research of pedagogy in the technical and professional communication classroom is needed to understand social justice teaching across multiple contexts. This collective case study discusses social justice-focused assignments given by eight instructors at different institutions. Results show that institutions with more diverse populations may have advantages in making social justice power differentials salient. Further, teacher positionality impacts the degree of social justice content incorporated.

This paper examines the civic and literacy practices that emerged through virtual feminista pláticas between Adri, a first-year college student and graduate of a “newcomers” high school, and her former teacher. Amidst a context in which transnational and immigrant youth often struggle to find a sense of belonging in educational and civic spaces, this article reveals the importance of relationships and spaces built on trust, care, and the co-construction of knowledge in which multilingual recently arrived youth can elevate their voices. I draw from transcripts of over seven hours of translingual virtual feminista pláticas. I draw on the concepts of border thinking (Anzaldúa, 2012, 2015; Mignolo, 2000) and futurity literacies from the margins (Cervantes-Soon, 2024) to deepen our understandings of speculative civic literacies (Mirra &amp; Garcia, 2022). Findings reveal how Adri drew upon her border thinking to critically interrogate a deeply unjust global context and to imagine alternative futures for herself and her communities. This work highlights the epistemic ingenuity of transnational youth like Adri and the civic and literacy practices that can emerge through methodologies and pedagogies that recognize that ingenuity.

Drawing from theories of youth speculative civic literacies and freedom dreaming, this article explores how youth imagine the future of education and what roles schools and teachers play in fostering students’ dreaming. In this research study, the three co-authors—a literacy professor, an undergraduate English major, and a graduating high school student/future teacher—engage in intergenerational qualitative data analysis to discover how youth cultivate the capacities and imagination to engage in speculative educational dreaming. Through analysis of student interviews and youth counternarratives, we found that the types of interactions students have with their teachers as well as the availability of authentic opportunities for youth to engage in civic thought and action in schools are instrumental in the shaping of youth imagination and agency. For many students, school is something that is happening to them rather than for them. However, when their ideas and voices are heard within schools, it compels students to think about the world outside of school and their place in it. Conceptualizing student dreaming as acts of discovering and moving toward one’s purpose, we posit that engagement in critical civic praxis and relational encounters in learning environments are instrumental factors in the cultivation of youth agency and capacities for freedom dreaming.

By Natalie Shellenberger. This bibliographic essay explores the use of Derrick Bell’s concept of interest convergence in the fields of composition, rhetoric, and writing studies since his definition of the principle in 1980. After a brief overview of the concept of interest convergence and its implications to the fields of rhetoric and writing/composition studies, the main focus of this essay will turn to how it is currently taken up within the discipline: pedagogical development, writing administration, and academic scholarship and where to go from here.

By Meghan Hancock. I came to Threshold Conscripts: Rhetoric and Composition Teaching Assistantships—as I think many of us would—with vivid memories of my first semester teaching first-year writing. I felt some panic and anxiety, of course, at the very idea of a teaching role, but I was also struggling to reconcile the conflicting roles I carried. As Laura R. Micciche puts it in the Foreword to this collection, I was “not-quite teacher and not-quite student,” but was, nevertheless, asked to take on the important role of introducing students to college-level writing (xii). The anxieties and learning moments brought about by these intersecting identities make graduate student instructors of composition a rich and vital population to study, and yet as this collection consistently argues, the field of Writing Studies needs more scholarship examining their experiences. It is this gap that Threshold Conscripts, edited by William Macauley, Jr., Leslie R. Anglesey, Brady Edwards, Kathryn M. Lambrecht, and Phillip K. Lovas, addresses in its collective works that closely analyze the lived experiences of graduate RCTAs (rhetoric and composition teaching assistants) as they attempt to balance their multiple roles as teachers and students.

Megan McIntyre Abstract In response to a growing awareness of the oppressive foundations of educational institutions, literacy educators have turned to antiracist, culturally responsive (Alim and Paris; Paris), and equitable teaching and assessment practices to combat the inequities (colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, etc.) on which our institutions are built. According to scholars including Geneva [&hellip;]

Rebekah Sims and Sharon Hunter Abstract This program(me) profile describes the development of embedded writing instruction within a Scottish initial teacher education course: the Professional Graduate Diploma in Education (PGDE). This programme is the main entry route into primary and secondary school teaching in Scotland, where all teaching is a university-degreed profession. This profile describes [&hellip;]

Assessing the writing competence of pupils learning English as a foreign language (EFL) at primary school is challenging. This study aimed at examining a largely unexplored topic, namely the role of text characteristics in writing assessment, and analysed judgment accuracy differentiated by nine aspects of text quality (communicative effect, level of detail, coherence, cohesion, complexity of syntax and grammar, correctness of syntax and grammar, vocabulary, orthography and punctuation). Two hundred pre-service teachers assessed four randomly assigned texts from learners in grade six. Their assessment was compared to the existing ratings of two experts from a previous study. We found a relative judgment accuracy between r = .34 and .60 for the nine assessment criteria, with vocabulary being assessed significantly more accurately than almost all other criteria. Orthography, complexity and correctness of syntax and grammar and punctuation were rated with significantly more accuracy than cohesion, level of detail, communicative effect and coherence. The pre-service teachers assessed most criteria more strictly and with higher variability than the experts. The results suggest that teacher education should offer pre-service teachers concrete opportunities to practise writing assessment, implement activities to strengthen the assessment of content- and structure-related criteria, and help them adjust their assessment rigour. • Judgment accuracy in the assessment of primary school EFL learners’ texts. • Relative judgment accuracy between r = .34 and .60 for the different criteria. • Significant differences in relative judgment accuracy between assessment criteria. • Linguistic text qualities are assessed with more accuracy than content- and structure-related aspects. • Pre-service teachers are more rigorous and heterogeneous in rating than experts.

Comparative Judgement (CJ) is a pairwise comparison evaluation method, typically conducted online. Multiple judges each compare the quality of a series of paired performances and, from their decisions, a rank order is constructed and scores calculated. Research across different educational contexts supports CJ’s reliability for evaluating written performances, permitting more precise scoring of scripts and for dimension-focused evaluation. However, scant insights are available about the basis of judges’ evaluations. This issue is important because argument-based approaches to validation (common in the field of language testing and adopted in this study) require evidence to support claims about how scores are appropriate for test purpose. Therefore, we investigate the scoring validity of CJ, both when used holistically (the standard application of CJ) and when evaluating scripts by individual criteria (termed dimensions in the research context). Twenty-seven judges evaluated 300 scripts addressing two writing task types in a national English as a Foreign Language examination for young learners in Austria. Judges reported via questionnaires what they had focused on while judging. Subsequently, eight judges provided think-aloud data while evaluating 157 scripts, offering further insight into the writing features they considered and their decision-making during CJ. Findings showed that while most judges adapted a decision-making process similar to traditional rating methods, some adapted their method to accommodate the nature of CJ evaluation. Furthermore, results indicated that the judges considered construct-relevant criteria when using CJ, both holistically and by dimension, thus offering support to an argument for the appropriateness of using CJ in this context. • Comparative Judgement can offer an alternative to analytic rating of EFL writing. • Judges with teaching or rating experience largely focus on relevant text features. • Some judges adopt a decision-making process that appears well suited to CJ. • Dimension-based CJ has the potential to provide richer feedback than holistic CJ.