We end Volume Year 51 with a set of articles that emphasize language, particularly the teaching and learning of the grammatical structure, styles, and registers that undergird the English language arts and become ever more visible in a multilingual world.

Though applied linguists have critiqued the concept of the native speaker for decades, it continues to dominate the TESOL profession in ways that marginalize nonnative English–speaking teachers. In this article, we describe a naturalistic study of literacy negotiations in a course that we taught as part of the required sequence for a TESOL teacher education program. The course had the explicit goals of (a) supporting preservice teachers, many of whom are nonnative English speakers, in challenging these native-speaker ideologies, and (b) introducing preservice teachers to translingualism as a framework for challenging these ideologies with their own students. We focus on one of the culminating projects, in which students developed their own projects that enacted the new understanding of language associated with translingualism. By looking closely at the journey of three students through this project, we shed light on the possibilities and challenges of bringing a translingual perspective into TESOL teacher education, as well as the possibilities and challenges confronted by preservice TESOL teachers who are nonnative English speakers in incorporating a translingual perspective into their own teaching. These case studies indicate that providing nonnative English teachers with opportunities to engage in translingual projects can support them both in developing more positive conceptualizations of their identities as multilingual teachers and in developing pedagogical approaches for students that build on their home language practices in ways that challenge dominant language ideologies.

Text-driven, quantitative methods provide new ways to analyze student writing, by uncovering recurring grammatical features and related stylistic effects that remain tacit to students and those who read and evaluate student writing. To date, however, these methods are rarely used in research on students transitioning into US postsecondary writing, and especially rare are studies of student writing that is already scored according to high-stakes writing expectations. This study offers a corpus-based, comparative analysis of higher- and lower-scoring Advanced Placement (AP) exams in English, revealing statistically significant syntactic patterns that distinguish higher-scoring exams according to “informational production” and lower-scoring essays according to “involved” or “interactional” production (Biber, 1988). These differences contribute to what we label emphatic generality in the lower-scoring essays, in which writers tend to foreground human actors, including themselves. In contrast, patterns in higher-scoring essays achieve what we call elaborated specificity, by focusing on and explicating specific, often abstract, concepts.These findings help uncover what is rewarded (or not) in high-stakes writing assessments and show that some students struggle with register awareness. A related implication, then, is the importance of teaching register awareness to students at the late secondary and early university level—students who are still relative novices, but are being invited to compose informationally dense prose. Such register considerations, and specific features revealed in this study, provide ways to help demystify privileged writing forms for students, particularly students for whom academic writing may seem distant from their own communicative practices and ambitions.

In this article, I explore the ways that non-tenure-track faculty might develop a place in collective leadership alongside tenure-track faculty. Drawing on theoretical framing from Theodore Kemper’s research on structures of emotion in social movements, I offer a way to better understand how authentic respect for teaching and service as scholarly work helps develop opportunities for non-tenure-track teachers to develop their expertise as leaders. I illustrate some of these possibilities and suggest that these leadership opportunities may ultimately help increase visibility and respect for non-tenure-track faculty.

Tenure-line faculty—teaching onsite or online—are typically perceived as resident scholars and instructors who live local to their institutions. A geographically diversified tenure-line faculty, however, could also serve the education of students by bringing a wider array of influences and opportunities to the online classroom. Programs in technical communication must examine how to incorporate extralocated faculty and how to prepare willing and eligible faculty for extralocated teaching, research, and service.

On November 2, 2016, Theresa Jarnagin Enos unexpectedly passed away at her home in Tucson, Arizona, leaving behind a trailblazing legacy of work in writing, teaching, scholarly editing, (wo)mentori...

Since I began teaching a course titled Writing in the Community, I have been fascinated with how narratives deepen students’ service-learning experiences. In their article “Narrative Learning in Adulthood,” M. Carolyn Clark and Marsha Rossiter say that stories “draw us into an experience at more than a cognitive level; they engage our spirit, our imagination, our heart, and this engagement is complex and holistic.” Narratives give broader context to students’ service, foster critical consciousness, help students believe they can make a contribution in their own communities, and contribute to making service-learning a transformative experience, all outcomes that remind us of the importance of the humanities in forming active citizens.

This essay describes a graduate course, The Nineteenth-Century Novel in Context, that I developed and taught in fall 2011 at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. The essay was developed from an oral presentation that was part of a teaching panel at the Northeast Victorian Studies Association annual conference in the spring of 2013. The course was my final effort to “go wide” in teaching Victorian literature in its larger context, a desire that grew increasingly difficult to satisfy as the canon of Victorian literature became enlarged and thus somewhat unstable. I also wanted to organize the readings so that my students might get a sense of the literary context in which Victorian readers might have experienced the individual texts when they read them in the nineteenth century. In an effort to describe how I got to the syllabus for The Nineteenth-Century Novel in Context (included as an appendix), I give a personal sense of the history of the field of Victorian literature over the last fifty years, tracing the development of the field of English literature in general and Victorian literature in particular. I end with my evaluation of the course I developed, its strengths and its weaknesses, and what I learned from it.

Review Article| April 01 2017 The Crisis of Composition: Teaching and Resistance in the Neoliberal Era Composition in the Age of Austerity. Edited by Welch, Nancy and Scott, Tony. Utah State University Press, 2016. 235 pages. Phillip Goodwin Phillip Goodwin Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2017) 17 (2): 351–358. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3770245 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Phillip Goodwin; The Crisis of Composition: Teaching and Resistance in the Neoliberal Era. Pedagogy 1 April 2017; 17 (2): 351–358. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3770245 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 by Duke University Press2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

This essay discusses the affordances of using an affect-based approach to 9/11 discourses that facilitates teaching civic engagement. Representations and rhetoric about 9/11 are found in a range of modes—film, documentary, literature, news coverage, and official government documents. Asking students to analyze these representations using a variety of rhetorical strategies highlights the way that various sources of (competing) knowledge about the national tragedy disrupt the notion that there is an accepted, uniform way of understanding this event. Furthermore, this approach demonstrates how varied sources of meaning making construct our public sphere.

Introduction| April 01 2017 Introduction: A Roundtable on “Teaching 1874” Suzy Anger Suzy Anger Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2017) 17 (2): 321–322. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3770181 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Suzy Anger; Introduction: A Roundtable on “Teaching 1874”. Pedagogy 1 April 2017; 17 (2): 321–322. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3770181 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 by Duke University Press2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: From the Classroom You do not currently have access to this content.

This article applies the idea of pivoting to teaching British history and cultural studies, both by focusing on a pivotal year's watershed events and by artfully telling a before-and-after story about a less noteworthy event. My teaching tool in this case was the year 1874, which was pivotal in the first sense of the word owing to Benjamin Disraeli's defeat of William Gladstone and the subsequent decline of laissez-faire and rise of imperialism. I discuss how I use that event as a pivot by referring back to the culture of voluntarism that had promoted Gladstone's popularity and to blind spots in Gladstonian liberalism that rendered him politically vulnerable in 1874. I then turn to my experience teaching a one-week unit on the British annexation of Fiji, which also occurred in 1874. In this unit I assigned some students to report on the career of the first governor of Fiji, Arthur Gordon, who governed five other British colonies before and after 1874, and I asked other students to pre sent group reports on four different perspectives on Fiji that accompanied annexation, by a company promoter, a tourist, a missionary, and an adventure novelist.

This article informs educators about the importance and challenges of teaching digital reading practices. In positioning reading as a design-oriented activity and readers as text designers, instructors can teach genre awareness as a way to help students strongly engage with and comprehend digital texts.

A quantitative research study collects numerical data that must be analyzed to help draw the study’s conclusions. Teaching quantitative data analysis is not teaching number crunching, but teaching a way of critical thinking for how to analyze the data. The goal of data analysis is to reveal the underlying patterns, trends, and relationships of a study’s contextual situation. Learning data analysis is not learning how to use statistical tests to crunch numbers but is, instead, how to use those statistical tests as a tool to draw valid conclusions from the data. Three major pedagogical goals that must be taught as part of learning quantitative data analysis are the following: (a) determining what questions to ask during all phases of a data analysis, (b) recognizing how to judge the relevance of potential questions, and (c) deciding how to understand the deep-level relationships within the data.

This article examines the teaching of a multimodal pedagogy in an online technical communication classroom. Based on the results of an e-portfolio assessment, the authors argue that multimodality can be taught successfully in the online environment if the instructor carefully plans and scaffolds each assignment. Specifically, they argue for an increased emphasis within the technical communication classroom on teaching the e-portfolio as a genre that not only exemplifies students’ multimodal literacies but also establishes their identities as technical communicators in the 21st century. This article provides a model for teaching multimodal composition in the online technical communication classroom and calls for more scholarship on teaching the e-portfolio in the digital environment.

Symposium contribution.

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

In this article, I seek to reflexively examine my practice as an EAP teacher given the task of teaching academic writing to a group of Japanese graduate school students studying for a Master of Arts in English Language Education at a private university in Tokyo. Drawing on Lillis’ (2003) notions of ‘critique’ and ‘design’, my article covers the following areas: (1) student conceptualizations of ‘good’ academic writing; (2) the need for a socially-situated approach to academic writing that takes into account writers’ identities and subjectivities; (3) the manner in which such identities and subjectivities are not static or pre-existent, but are discursively constructed and subject to individual negotiation and agency; (4) student insights into how such negotiated identities and subjectivities can be reified and enacted in written work; (5) the way students can move into a ‘design’ mode through imagining and asserting new possibilities for meaning making. Throughout, I am concerned with how teachers can best help students appreciate the value of discovering the discursive and dynamic nature of their identity-borne narratives. I also argue that such a realization can provide students with a richer understanding of their ontological positioning as writers vis-à-vis writing as a socially-situated meaning making activity.

Icy Lee introduces Writing and Pedagogy 8.3 (2016)

From the perspective of sociocultural theories, individual writing conferences between a teacher and a student offer an optimal dialogical framework for negotiating and adjusting oral corrective feedback (CF) to L2 students’ developmental levels with the aim of enhancing students’ ability to self-correct. While some empirical findings support the use of negotiated CF, little research has examined the extent to which teachers negotiate CF with their students or the way they change their CF strategies in naturalistic writing conferences, especially in the Chinese EFL context. The current case study used and adapted regulatory scales for CF developed by Aljaafreh and Lantolf (1994) and by Erlam, Ellis, and Batstone (2013), to analyse teacher talk addressing linguistic errors in two writing conferences at a Chinese university. The two teachers were found to use very different approaches to providing CF. One teacher often began with implicit CF and gradually tailored her subsequent CF after eliciting the student’s responses. Contrastingly, the other teacher often diagnosed errors and supplied correction without inviting input from the student. The findings suggested that teachers’ beliefs about feedback, their goals of having writing conferences, availability of time resources, and the curriculum focus could impact their choice to negotiate CF with students.

234 RHETORICA drawn to images from these periods - "the body's inside and outside, the heart offered on an outstretched hand" - that reveal "historically elaborated semiot­ ics of the self," expressing competing views of what constituted a moral bal­ ance of public and private (214). So, when she offers her detailed case study of irony and sincerity in the ethos of author Dave Eggers, it is grounded in a historical understanding of these terms. Historians of rhetoric may find themselves frustrated by aspects of Korthals Altes's book, a point she acknowledges as a likely effect of the wide net she casts. For example, her central term, ethos, is not as thoroughly historicized as are other framing concepts like sincerity, irony, and hermeneutics. While she traces these over centuries, her approach to ethos is to provide snapshots from ancient Greece and Rome and then to pick up the term in its modern uses in narrative analysis. This method drops at least one major thread that seems highly germaine to her project: the pre-Aristotelian sense of ethos, robustly revived in the last two decades, as location or haunt. Korthals Altes's use of topoi answers her need to flesh out the rhetorical commonplaces of ethos construction, but her discussion of the textual, virtual, and physical spaces that modem authors inhabit calls out to ethos's more ancient meaning. Further, the degree to which ethos overlaps with related terms like posture, self, persona, and implied author, are never made clear. But in placing ancient renderings of ethos within modem methods of literary criticism, Ethos and Narrative Interpretation reminds us just how fraught and complex the practice of reading others has always been. Daniel A. Cryer, Roosevelt University Mark Garrett Longaker, Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment (RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric), University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. 170 pp. ISBN 978-0-271-07086-5. While reading Mark Garrett Longaker's recent book, Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment, I was struck by the author's reluctance to employ contemporary theory as a lens through which to evaluate Enlightenment perspectives on civic virtue, eco­ nomics, and rhetoric, for indeed, twenty-first-century rhetorical studies often marshal critical perspectives to try the past. While it is impossible to read his­ torical texts innocently, Longaker strives to explore his principal figures—John Locke, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and Herbert Spencer—on their own terms. Thus, I was not surprised when in his conclusion he explicitly addresses his approach, revealing that although he is "a political socialist and a historical materialist," he adheres to the principle audite et alteram partem: "listen even to the other side" (pp. 134-35). It is this careful listening, which enables Reviews 235 Longaker to articulate his subjects significance in the British Enlightenment, that perhaps best characterizes this fine volume. In his introduction, Longaker concisely presents his "principal argument"—that "in the late seventeenth, mid-eighteenth, and mid-nineteenth centuries a British philosopher, a political economist, a rhetorical theorist, and a sociologist all tried to cultivate bourgeois virtue by teaching rhetorical style, each building on others' ideas and each addressing a unique stage of capitalist development" (p. 2). Each of the study's four chapters features one of Longaker's principal theorists, along with his key rhetorical emphasis: Locke and clarity, Smith and probity, Blair and moderation, and Spencer and economy. In chapter 1, Longaker astutely distills Locke's well-known recommenda­ tions concerning the abuses of language and his mistrust of disputation into "four rules to remedy language's infirmity" (p. 14). Conducting a "synthetic reading" of Locke's work, he then demonstrates how each rule elucidates dif­ ferent areas of the philosopher's corpus. For example, the "Rule of Propriety" describes Locke's view of both effective language and stable currency. Longaker closes the chapter by suggesting that Locke's actual prose style conforms to his rules of clarity and that his writings on education "developed a rhetorical pedagogy of clarity" (p. 37). Although most scholars of rhetoric who consider Locke tend to highlight a few of his well-worn...

The purpose of this research is to examine specific examples of how business communication courses are delivered in large, face-to-face university classes to discover implications of these large courses. This case study reviewed four classes from two different midsized universities whose classes range from 48 to 300 students. Findings suggest that, when faced with the possibility of teaching more students, it is important to understand that pedagogical strategies may need to be adjusted to maintain student learning. These strategies include modifying the course to the lecture/lab structure, limiting the amount of writing, or allowing the instructor to teach fewer courses.

Two business communication faculty share the story of teaching a 780-person business writing class. The article discusses the challenges of teaching such a large writing class. Challenges ranged from adopting a hybrid course model to hiring adjunct faculty for help with the task of grading. The article offers lessons learned, and recommends that one proceed with caution when considering a superlarge format for writing instruction. Both theory and experience are used to support this position.

This article examines the social and academic barriers international teachers face in the composition classroom and what they have to offer to the teaching of first-year writing.

This essay and the teaching externship it describes grew out of our attempt to respond to gaps in two-year college English instructor preparation, particularly in basic writing, at Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, Nebraska.

Lloyd Bitzer's passing came as deeply sad news. He was an exceptional person in all respects. I was fortunate to have been his student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and to have experienced Lloyd in my life as a mentor, a colleague in the discipline, a confidant, a friend, and a role model. The discipline of rhetoric was fortunate to have had him among its ranks as a leading theorist. He was among those most responsible for pushing rhetorical studies into new territory during the latter part of the twentieth century. Lloyd was the principle investigator on and driving force behind the National Developmental Project on Rhetoric, which involved forty scholars from philosophy, rhetoric, communication, English, and sociology at the Wingspread and Pheasant Run conferences at the beginning of the 1970s and which culminated in The Prospect of Rhetoric, the volume he coedited with his colleague Edwin Black. And Philosophy and Rhetoric was fortunate to have him grace its pages with his scholarship and editorial advice. His iconic essay “The Rhetorical Situation” inaugurated the journal in 1968 as the lead article. It set the stage for reconsidering rhetoric in terms of its philosophical commitments.Lloyd was not a prolific publisher, but each of his articles were gems of careful scholarship and tight reasoning, and they demonstrate an unfailing sense for ideas that matter and an understanding of the impact those ideas could have on future work. His 1959 Quarterly Journal of Speech article “Aristotle's Enthymeme Revisited” broke new ground by decoupling the form of pisteis Aristotle regarded as the heart of persuasion from its logical form. His 1960 QJS article “A Re-evaluation Campbell's Doctrine of Evidence” argued that Campbell, in following Hume, had inverted the two-millennial-old Western tradition that established reason as the capital of right action and instead located it in the passions. His subsequent editor's introduction to the edited republication of Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric and his 1969 Philosophy and Rhetoric article “Hume's Philosophy in George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric” meticulously made the case for Hume's role in introducing rhetoric into the new country wherein its study led to understanding human nature. In 1978, when consideration of the public sphere was just beginning to emerge as a scholarly topic in the literature on rhetoric, Lloyd published his award- winning essay “Rhetoric and Public Knowledge,” in which he considered the necessary conditions for distinguishing between audiences and publics. It was not a coincidence that two years earlier he broke form with the practice of association presidents in the then Speech Communication Association of offering as their presidential address reflections on the discipline when he presented a version of this paper as his presidential address. His choice was an expression of his belief that presidents of scholarly societies should lead by example of their scholarship.Lloyd's presidential address, as much as anything, captured his sense of himself as a scholar and teacher and spoke to what he considered the nobility of his and our work. Studying with him was at once exhilarating, fearsome, calming, and affirming. He was demanding of his students, excited by ideas, not given to tolerating sloppy thinking or unsupported argument, quick to affirm student insights and progress, able to express and inspire confidence in his students' work, and generous with his time and counsel, always willing to assist his students' growth and prosperity. My friend Tom Farrell, another of Lloyd's doctoral students, captured well how lasting an impact our mentor had when, in the prime of our careers, he commented “I still write for Lloyd.” So did I; so do I still.In May 2015, the Rhetoric Society of America held its biennial summer Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I was filled with anticipation for the event, which is unique in its format and impact on its participants, for being once more in Madison where I had done my doctoral studies, and for the opportunity to spend time with colleagues, former students, and dear friends in the discipline. At the center of my excitement was the dinner date Lloyd and I had arranged. That evening was vintage Lloyd: he and his incomparable spouse Jo Ann arriving precisely on time, dinner at a favorite restaurant, lively and wide-ranging conversation covering shop talk, politics, the university, mutual friends, our children, and grandchildren. Too soon the evening ended, but Lloyd insisted that we should drive to his home outside Madison to drop off Jo Ann and have a nightcap before he took me back to my hotel on campus. He made certain we extended the evening so our conversation might continue. His characteristic care for how our time was spent conveyed more than words the intimacy of personal regard.Lloyd was not comfortable with warm expressions (he edited my dissertation acknowledgment of him, insisting I delete comments on what he meant to me—he meant the world—as something I might find embarrassing for their warmth in later years). But he knew how to convey his warmth and how to acknowledge it in return. He brought me to believe in myself as a young scholar, he filled me with admiration and trust, he inspired delight in intellectual work, and more than anyone he awakened my sense of its essential dignity. He touched the profession and this journal as a scholar. He touched me as a person. I shall remember Lloyd always with affection and gratitude. He enriched my life and I shall miss him dearly.

Established roles for praxis beyond teaching are often missing from discussions of RSTEM engagement with the science community. Although it is important to ground engagement in identifiable roles, it may be that these roles are still being conceived or need to be re-created contextually for every engagement situation. This paper grounds RSTEM engagement in one identifiable field of practice: scientific community management. RSTEM's specialized attention to and understanding of how science communities and genre systems interact can provide insight into the forming of these communities and their management.

In Poroi’s 2013 special issue “Inventing the Future: The Rhetorics of Science, Technology, and Medicine,” Lisa Keränen reflected on the variety of purposes contributing authors ascribe to the scholarship and practice of rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine (RSTM).1 Keränen especially noted the distinction Randy Harris, Lynda Walsh, and Carolyn Miller draw between studying persuasion and making persuasion happen. As Harris puts it, it’s the difference between “the impulse to understand persuasion and the impulse to achieve persuasion” (Keränen, 2013, para. 7; emphasis in original). The latter is the active choice, which Keränen refers as “engagement,” a term she equates to “public intellectualism.” As a lens through which to imagine possibilities for our work, however, “engagement” can be much more than merely doing scholarship in public. I don’t intend to wax pedantic here about precise interpretations of engagement. However, as Kenneth Walker and Sara Beth Parks show, without some definitional work “engagement” risks being reduced to only one of its many facets, which include not only public engagement (Berube, 2013; Ceccarelli, 2013; Keränen, 2013), but also classroom teaching (Ceccarelli, 2013) and transdisciplinary research with—rather than focused on—STEM practitioners and related stakeholders (Walker, this issue; Parks, this issue; Druschke, 2014).

This study investigates the move-step structures of Japanese and English introductory chapters of literature Ph.D. theses and perceptions of Ph.D. supervisors in the Japanese and UK higher education contexts. In this study, 51 Japanese and 48 English introductory chapters of literature Ph.D. theses written by first language writers of Japanese or English were collected from three Japanese and three British universities. Genre analysis of 99 introductory chapters was conducted using a revised “Create a Research Space” (CARS) model (Swales, 1990, 2004). Semi-structured interviews were also carried out with seven Japanese supervisors and ten British supervisors. The findings showed that the introductory chapters of literature Ph.D. theses had 13 move-specific steps and five move-independent steps, each of which presented different cyclical patterns, indicating cross-cultural similarities and differences between the two language groups. The perceptions of supervisors varied in terms of the importance and the sequence of individual steps in the introductory chapters. Based on the textual and interview analyses, a discipline-oriented Open-CARS model is proposed for pedagogical purposes of teaching and writing about this genre in Japanese or English in the field of literature and related fields.

Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: Spatial and Material Relationships in Teaching and Learning English, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/50/3/researchintheteachingofenglish28159-1.gif

Since the early 1990s, language and literacy scholars have explored the pedagogical potential of hip-hop culture in the English language arts classroom. Despite more than 25 years’ worth of peer-reviewed research documenting its effectiveness, hip-hop pedagogies continue to be relegated to the margins of English education policy and practice. In this essay, I argue that the future of “hip-hop based education” (HHBE) research in English education demands moving beyond making a case for hip-hop’s pedagogical merits and toward helping teachers and teacher educators put theories of HHBE into practice, given their various identities and institutional contexts. Thus, I begin by addressing practical and philosophical dilemmas regarding the role, purpose, and function of hip-hop-based curricular interventions in this current era of the Common Core State Standards. As the title of this Forum piece suggests, hip-hop culture and pedagogy are more than just rap music and textual analysis. Therefore, I seek to shift the conversation from pedagogies with hip-hop texts to a more complex unit of analysis known as “pedagogies with hip-hop aesthetics.” With a broader and deeper understanding of hip-hop cultural knowledge, as well as the tensions and contradictions contributing to the shortcomings of HHBE research, I conclude with a call for additional studies that “show and prove” the possibilities (and pitfalls) of hip-hop pedagogies in English language arts and English education classrooms.

This article theorizes teaching as accommodation and argues for a centering of disability in writing pedagogy. It examines how universal design can improve composition classrooms, applying inclusive principles to the syllabus in particular.

This article uses systems and complexity theory to illustrate key characteristics of writing as a complex system. This illustration reveals how writing works on multiple levels of scale, and adds to the body of theoretical knowledge that can be taught within the discipline of writing studies. In so doing, it shows how a complex systems writing pedagogy can benefit both researchers and students.

Style pedagogies, as many composition scholars have argued, have largely fallen out of favor in the last few decades. Those who have examined the decline have pointed to the deemphasis of the text prompted by the process movement as well as the subsequent social turn in composition studies. This article, in contrast, looks to the emergence of postmodernism and the ways in which it challenged and continues to complicate the theorizing and teaching of style. The author argues that embrace of a self-reflexive, “essayistic” voice would allow the instructor to exploit postmodernist impulses while revitalizing the teaching of style.

The rapid increase in online learning programs has led to an increase in the number of students taking composition courses online. As a result, there is a need to develop teaching practices and approaches to feedback designed specifically for online learning environments, which serve a largely nontraditional student population. Addressing a current gap in the literature regarding approaches to feedback that meet the needs of nontraditional students, this quasi-experimental study used a process model of composition and post-positivist and social constructivist epistemological orientations to measure student perceptions and preferences when provided with text-only feedback or a combination of textual and audio-visual commentary. Results indicate that the majority of students, if given the choice, prefer a combination of audio-visual and text-based commentary to textual feedback alone because they consider it helpful and feel that it enhances their overall understanding of instructor feedback by providing more detail and by using auditory and visual modes of communication. Students also liked audio-visual feedback because they considered it a form of personalized and individualized interaction, and some felt that it helped them spend more time and effort on revision.

This article examines teacher feedback on student compositions in an Advanced French Composition course at a Research 1 institution. Our study suggests that when teachers combine written corrective feedback with audio comments, their engagement in grading compositions may rise significantly. As teachers bring renewed energy to familiar responding practices, they shift from “grader” to “reader.” These findings have important implications for teacher training and the role of feedback in L2 courses.

Welcome to the second issue of our third year of publication. As the journal has become more established, we are seeing a wide range of fascinating research and teaching work related to response to writing in both first and second language contexts. This issue is no different. In this issue, we present two research articles, two teaching articles, and a book review. In the first piece, “L2 Learners’ Engagement with Direct Written Corrective Feedback in First-Year Composition Courses,” Izabela Uscinski examines how second language learners of English engage with feedback from their college writing teachers. Uscinski draws on Svalberg’s (2009) definition of engagement, suggesting that it “encompasses not only the cognitive realm, but also affective and social.” To better understand how writers make use of written corrective feedback and whether it leads to meta-awareness and noticing of language structures, she recruited eight Chinese-L1 first-year college students taking a stretch composition course at a university in the United States. She asked the students to meet with her when they had received grammar feedback from their teachers and recorded the computer screen as they revised their essays. Playing back the recordings, she then asked the students to discuss what they had done and why.

This study explores student written responses to teacher feedback and analyzes these responses through the framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA). Drawing on CDA, we examined the structural, interactional, and interdiscursive features of 21 students’ paragraph-length comments on formative teacher feedback on their first assignment draft in a first-year composition class and investigated relations between the text, interaction, and context. The structural analysis indicates that the students’ comments demonstrate their emerging academic literacy skills. Our interactional analysis shows that most students took on an active role as a good student and a hardworking writer, but some students exerted their agency by taking the opportunity to resist the authority of the teacher, while others rejected it altogether. Our interdiscursive analysis illustrates that students used not only language from the teacher’s comments, but also metalanguage of the composition classroom to formulate their responses. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for teaching practices and future avenues for research on students’ responses to teacher feedback.

Peer response is one of the most important activities in writing classrooms because it provides a sense of audience to students. At the same time, students also receive feedback for revision. Asking L2 writers to use their L1s in providing feedback to their L1-speaking peers helps them gain confidence in peer response activities, which in turn gives them self-confidence in their writing proficiency. In this small-scale pilot project, L2 students were asked to reflect on their use of L1s providing both oral and written feedback. They reported that students felt they could express their feedback in a more meaningful way. The article concludes with pedagogical implications in teaching writing in both ESL and EFL contexts.

Sustainable feedback practices, that can encourage self-regulation of performance and improvement in future work beyond an immediate task, require our students to be active participants in, and users of, the feedback we provide. Critical to this participation are the internal feedback mechanisms of reflection and self-assessment. They require students to make evaluations about their own writing without the aid of external agents, which in turn can encourage better use of teacher feedback. Moreover, dialogic collaborative feedback that encourages this type of self-evaluation through interactive cover sheets has been featured in existing practitioner research studies. This teaching article presents an extension to the use of such cover sheets to include student self-evaluation and reflection in relation to specific marking criteria as part of an existing feedback cycle on a first-year undergraduate course. Observations from the practitioner research presented here highlight how the inclusion of such rubric criteria not only helped to develop students’ confidence in independently monitoring and evaluating their writing but also heightened awareness of the rhetorical features of their texts.

Writing academic texts in one’s native language (L1) and – even more – in a foreign language (FL) places high cognitive demands on students. In order to cope with these demands, writers should learn to adapt their writing methods flexibly to their tasks, depending on the language and the genre they are writing in. Crucial aspects here are the methods of revising because the need for linguistic revision will be higher in the FL text than in the L1 text; at the same time, it should not be the main or only focus of the revision process. In order to analyse the differences in L1 and FL revision, a study was set up in which ten L1 German students wrote academic essays in German and in English. The production process was protocolled with the help of keylogging, so that the revising processes could be analysed. The results show that the participants revised similarly in both the L1 and the FL. They focussed on the same aspects (content, typing mistakes, and language errors that were not L1 related). At the same time, there are differences in finer grades. These differences in revision do not seem to be a conscious decision, however, but are rather the result of the higher cognitive demands in FL academic writing and the lower degree of language knowledge. Additionally, the analysis of the final FL texts showed that most of the errors that were not corrected were L1 induced. When one looks at the revisions, however, one sees that hardly any revisions were made in these aspects: the L1 influence went more or less unnoticed. For writing pedagogy, this means that one has to put a higher focus on revision strategies during teaching, in order to give students the tools to write successfully in L1 and in FL, and to motivate them in enhancing their papers.

Objective: We report on a comparative study of the language used by middle school students in their answers to a constructed response test of science inquiry knowledge. Background: Text analyses using statistical models have been conducted across a number of disciplines to identify topics in a journal, to extract topics in Twitter messages, and to investigate political preferences. In education, relatively few studies have analyzed the text of students’ written answers to investigate topics underlying the answers. Methodology: Two types of linguistic analysis were compared to investigate their utility in understanding students’ learning of scientific investigation practices. A statistical method, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), was used to extract topics from the texts of student responses. In the LDA model, topics are viewed as multinomial distributions over the vocabulary of documents. These topics were examined for content and used to characterize student responses on the constructed response items. The change from pre-test to post-test in proportions of use of each of the topics was related to students’ learning. Next, a qualitative method, systemic functional linguistic (SFL) analysis, was used to analyze the text of student responses on the same test of science inquiry knowledge. Student assessments were analyzed for two linguistic features that are important for convincing scientific communication: technical vocabulary usage and high lexical density. In this way, we investigated whether human judgement regarding the changes observed from texts based on the SFL framework agreed with the inference regarding the changes observed from the texts through LDA. Research questions: Two research questions were investigated in this study: (1) What do the LDA and SFL analyses tell us about students’ answers? (2) What are the similarities and differences of the two analyses? Data: The data for this study were taken from an NSF-funded host study on teaching science inquiry skills to middle school students who were a mix of both native English speakers and English-language learners. The primary objective was to enable participants to learn to take ownership of scientific language through the use of language-rich science investigation practices. The LDA analysis used a sample of 252 students’ pre-and post-assessments. The SFL analysis used a second sample of 90 students’ pre- and post-assessments. Results: In the LDA analysis, three topics were detected in student responses: “preponderance of everyday language (Topic 1),” “preponderance of general academic language (Topic 2),” and “preponderance of discipline-specific language (Topic 3).” Students’ use of topics changed from pre-test to post-test. Students on the post-test tended to have higher proportions of Topic 3 than students on the pre-test. In the SFL analysis, students tended to use more technical vocabulary and have higher lexical density in their written responses on the post-test than on the pre-test. Discussion: Results from the LDA and SFL analyses suggest that students responded using more discipline-specific language on the post-test than on the pre-test. In addition, the results of the two linguistic features from the SFL analysis, technical vocabulary usage and lexical density, were compared with the results from the LDA analysis. • Conclusion: Results of the LDA and SFL analyses were consistent with each other and clearly showed that students improved in their ability to use the discipline-specific and academic terminology of the language of scientific communication.

Aim: The screencast (SC), a 21st century analytics tool, enables the simultaneous recording of audio and video feedback on any digital document, image, or website, and may be used to enhance feedback systems in many educational settings. Although previous findings show that students and teachers have had positive experiences with recorded commentary, this method is still rarely used by teachers in composition classrooms. There are many possible reasons for this, some of which include the accelerated pace at which classroom technology has changed over the past decade, concerns over privacy when new technologies are integrated into the classroom, and the general unease instructors may feel when asked to integrate a new technology system into their established composition pedagogy and response routine. The aim of this study was to replicate previous findings in favor of SC feedback and expand that body of research beyond instructor-to-student SC interactions and into the realm of SC-mediated peer review. Thus, this study seeks to improve on the widespread written peer review practices most common among writing instruction today, practices that tend to produce mediocre learning outcomes and fail to capitalize on 21st century technological innovations to enhance student learning. This research note demonstrates the validity of SC as a valuable writing analytics research tool that has the potential to collect and measure student learning. It also seeks to inspire those who have been reluctant to adopt SC in both digital learning and face-to-face educational environments by providing pragmatic guidance for doing so in ways that simultaneously increase student learning and facilitate a more rigorous and discursive peer-to-peer review process. Problem Formation: While research suggests positive student perceptions related to screencast instructor response, results in peer-to-peer screencast response are mixed. After several successful years of experience in instructor-to-student SC feedback, the author wondered what would happen if she asked students to use screencast technology to mediate peer review. How might students’ attitudes and perceptions impact the use of peer-to-peer screencast technology in the composition classroom? In order to address these questions, the author developed a survey measuring the user reliability of this new SC technology and the student affect and revision initiative it produces. Information Collection: This study extends Anson’s (2016) research and insights by reporting findings from a study of 138 writing students. Survey data was collected during the 2015-2016 academic year at three institutions. At High Point University, the author of this research note asked freshmen composition students in a traditional face-to-face lecture course to conduct a series of peer review sessions (including both traditional written comments and SC comments) over a 16-week semester. Students were surveyed after each peer review experience, and the results form the foundation of this research note’s conclusions. In addition to survey responses, researchers also collected the screencasts exchanged among peer-to-peer interactions within each educational setting. Conclusions: The author provides an in-depth analysis of students’ experiences, perceptions, and attitudes toward giving and receiving screencast feedback, focusing on the impact of this method on student revision initiative in comparison to that of a traditional written feedback system. Some conclusions are also drawn regarding the user reliability and effectiveness of the screencast technology, specifically the free software program known as Jing, a product available through Techsmith.com that enables a streamlined and user-friendly SC interface and cloud storage of all SC recordings through individualized hyperlinks, thereby alleviating concerns regarding student privacy. Directions for Further Research: While this research note provides compelling evidence to support the use of SC in composition classrooms, there are also many opportunities for continued study, particularly within the emerging field of writing analytics. While the actual student-to-student screencasts were collected in this study, they were not analyzed as a qualitative data set, and the researchers relied on self-reported survey data to assess the degree of revision initiative among the students surveyed. The screencasts themselves offer a treasure trove of data, should the researcher have the capability to code that data set or utilize automated natural language processing programs in the future. Perhaps this peer-to-peer SC feedback could be compared to similar corpus analyses of instructor-to-student feedback gathered by other writing analytics scholars. In addition, further research in this area could also collect the student writing itself and track revisions made by students after receiving SC feedback and traditional written feedback from their peers. In this way, researchers would be able to make comparisons between the actual changes made by the student writers, the extent of those changes (surface-level or higher-order revisions), and the student’s perceived degree of revision initiative reported in the survey. To facilitate future research in this area, the author has included teaching resources for those new to screencast technology and analytics.

Background: This study focuses on construct representation and inter-reader agreement and reliability in ePortfolio assessment of 1,315 writing portfolios. These portfolios were submitted by undergraduates enrolled in required writing seminars at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) in the fall of 2014.  Penn is an Ivy League university with a diverse student population, half of whom identify as students of color. Over half of Penn’s students are women, 12% are international, and 12% are first-generation college students. The students’ portfolios are scored by the instructor and an outside reader drawn from a writing-in-the-disciplines faculty who represent 24 disciplines. The portfolios are the product of a shared curriculum that uses formative assessment and a program-wide multiple-trait rubric. The study contributes to scholarship on the inter-reader reliability and validity of multiple-trait portfolio assessments as well as to recent discussions about reconceptualizing evidence in ePortfolio assessment.  Research Questions: Four questions guided our study: What levels of interrater agreement and reliability can be achieved when assessing complex writing performances that a) contain several different documents to be assessed; b) use a construct-based, multi-trait rubric; c) are designed for formative assessment rather than testing; and d) are rated by a multidisciplinary writing faculty?   What can be learned from assessing agreement and reliability of individual traits? How might these measurements contribute to curriculum design, teacher development, and student learning? How might these findings contribute to research on fairness, reliability, and validity; rubrics; and multidisciplinary writing assessment? Literature Review: There is a long history of empirical work exploring the reliability of scoring highly controlled timed writings, particularly by test measurement specialists. However, until quite recently, there have been few instances of applying empirical assessment techniques to writing portfolios.  Developed by writing theorists, writing portfolios contain multiple documents and genres and are produced and assessed under conditions significantly different from those of timed essay measurement. Interrater reliability can be affected by the different approaches to reading texts depending on the background, training, and goals of the rater. While a few writing theorists question the use of rubrics, most quantitatively based scholarship points to their effectiveness for portfolio assessment and calls into question the meaningfulness of single score holistic grading, whether impressionistic or rubric-based. Increasing attention is being paid to multi-trait rubrics, including, in the field of writing portfolio assessment, the use of robust writing constructs based on psychometrics alongside the more conventional cognitive traits assessed in writing studies, and rubrics that can identify areas of opportunity as well as unfairness in relation to the background of the student or the assessor. Scholars in the emergent field of empirical portfolio assessment in writing advocate the use of reliability as a means to identify fairness and validity and to create great opportunities for portfolios to advance student learning and professional development of faculty.  They also note that while the writing assessment community has paid attention to the work of test measurement practitioners, the reverse has not been the case, and that conversations and collaborations between the two communities are long overdue. Methodology: We used two methods of calculating interrater agreement: absolute and adjacent percentages, and Cohen’s Unweighted Kappa, which calculates the extent to which interrater agreement is an effect of chance or expected outcome. For interrater reliability, we used the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient. We used SPSS to produce all of the calculations in this study.  Results: Interrater agreement and reliability rates of portfolio scores landed in the medium range of statistical significance.  Combined absolute and adjacent percentages of interrater reliability were above the 90% range recommended; however, absolute agreement was below the 70% ideal.  Furthermore, Cohen’s Unweighted Kappa rates were statistically significant but very low, which may be due to “kappa paradox.” Discussion: The study suggests that a formative, rubric-based approach to ePortfolio assessment that uses disciplinarily diverse raters can achieve medium-level rates of interrater agreement and reliability. It raises the question of the extent to which absolute agreement is a desirable or even relevant goal for authentic feedback processes of a complex set of documents, and in which the aim is to advance student learning. At the same time, our findings point to how agreement and reliability measures can significantly contribute to our assessment process, teacher training, and curriculum. Finally, the study highlights potential concerns about construct validity and rater training.  Conclusion: This study contributes to the emergent field of empirical writing portfolio assessment that calls into question the prevailing standard of reliability built upon timed essay measurement rather than the measurement, conditions, and objectives of complex writing performances.  It also contributes to recent research on multi-trait and discipline-based portfolio assessment.  We point to several directions for further research:  conducting “talk aloud” and recorded sessions with raters to obtain qualitative data on areas of disagreement; expanding the number of constructs assessed; increasing the range and granularity of the numeric scoring scale; and investigating traits that are receiving low interrater reliability scores. We also ask whether absolute agreement might be more useful for writing portfolio assessment than reliability and point to the potential “kappa paradox,” borrowed from the field of medicine, which examines interrater reliability in assessment of rare cases. Kappa paradox might be useful in assessing types of portfolios that are less frequently encountered by faculty readers. These, combined with the identification of jagged profiles and student demographics, hold considerable potential for rethinking how to work with and assess students from a range of backgrounds, preparation, and abilities.  Finally, our findings contribute to a growing effort to understand the role of rater background, particularly disciplinarity, in shaping writing assessment. The goals of our assessment process are to ensure that we are measuring what we intend to measure, specifically those things that students have an equal chance at achieving and that advance student learning.  Our findings suggest that interrater agreement and reliability measures, if thoughtfully approached, will contribute significantly to each of these goals.

Chapter 1 be especially important to undergraduate science students, whose confidence in their own abilities as writers may have been damaged by experiences with writing in the classroom during their schooling (Choi et al., 2010;Shanahan, 2004).Several of the scientists and mathematicians in this study discuss damaging experiences with school and English teachers in particular.The anxious mathematics student, sitting in a writing class, who reads this comment by a successful applied mathematician, What's interesting is I did mathematics, I think, because I found English so difficult . . .I failed . . . on English and I was fine on mathematics.I was top in maths but I was desperate in English.I can remember the essay.The title was "Your House."Now as a mathematician . . .I've got to write about my house.What is my house?And I went to numbers straight away.It's got five windows, it's got one door-this is age 10 or 11.I knew it was a disaster when I wrote it.But I was incapable of doing anything better-Timothy, Chapter 3. may recognise a similar incident of their own, and may never have realised that the successful science or mathematics professor in their writing classroom may have experienced this kind of setback.Reading of