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

These researchers examine how questions function in a corpus of eleven writing center conferences conducted by experienced tutors. They analyze the 690 questions generated in these conferences: 81% (562) from tutors and 19% (128) from students. Using a coding scheme developed from prior research on questions in math, science, and other kinds of quantitative tutoring, they categorized tutors’ and students’ questions. The researchers found that questions in writing center conferences serve a number of instructional and conversational functions. Questions allow tutors and students to fill in their knowledge deficits and check each other’s understanding. They also allow tutors (and occasionally students) to facilitate the dialogue of writing center conferences and attend to students’ engagement. In addition, tutors use questions to help students clarify what they want to say, identify problems with what they have written, and brainstorm. Based on this analysis, the authors make some recommendations for tutor training. 85891-Writing Center-text.indd 37 3/10/14 2:52 PM Thompson & Mackiewicz | Questioning in Writing Center Conferences 38 Introduction To resist the role of teacher-surrogate in favor of the role of helpful peer or collaborator, to get students to do the talking, and generally to achieve a student-centered focus, tutors have been advised to use questions as primary tutoring strategies in writing center conferences (Brooks; Harris). In other words, tutors are supposed to use questions to indirectly guide students to improving their writing. In these oftenidealistic conceptions of writing center conferences, questions are “real,” genuinely reflecting an interest in who the students are and what they want to say rather than leading students to a particular point of view. Moreover, students’ satisfaction with writing center conferences has been connected to their perceptions of having their questions answered (Thompson, Whyte, Shannon, Muse, Miller, Chappell, & Whigham; Thonus, “Tutor and Student Assessments”). Tutors are supposed to encourage students to ask questions freely, and it is assumed that students will ask more questions in writing center conferences than in the classroom (Harris). However, beyond encouraging students to talk and beyond directing tutors toward students’ areas of confusion, questions are important prompts for learning and for maintaining students’ engagement in writing center conferences. Research about question asking and answering in the classroom has typically focused on how teachers can pose questions to enhance critical thinking for students. This research has shown that the dialogic Socratic method, with its back-and-forth questions and answers, is a more effective teaching strategy than didactic teacher talk (Rose, Bhembe, Siler, Srivastava, & VanLehn; see also Kintsch; Tienken, Goldberg, & DiRocco). Today questioning is one of the most frequently used classroom teaching techniques, with elementary and high school teachers asking as many as 300 to 400 questions per day (Tienken, Goldberg, & DiRocco). Research suggests that if used effectively either in the classroom or in one-to-one tutorials, questions can enhance students’ learning in at least three ways. First, as shown in Socrates’s questioning of his student about the concept of justice, questions can direct students in their efforts to “construct and reconstruct knowledge and understanding” (Smith & Higgins 486). By discussing what they are thinking with a more expert tutor or teacher, students engage in self-explanation, a process shown to deepen their understanding (Chi; Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann, & Glaser; Chi, De Leeuw, Chiu, & LaVancher; Rose, Bhembe, Siler, Srivastava, & VanLehn). Second, questions can enhance students’ motivation, stimulate curiosity, and encourage active participation in learning (Lustick; Smith & Higgins). 85891-Writing Center-text.indd 38 3/10/14 2:52 PM The Writing Center Journal 33.2 | Fall/Winter 2014 39 Third, teachers’ and tutors’ questions may become models for selfquestioning, important for students in regulating their own learning processes. Further, in both the classroom and in tutorials such as writing center conferences, learning typically occurs within a conversational context, and along with stimulating understanding, questions are vital linguistic components of an educational conversation. Besides helping tutors identify what students do not know, questions allow tutors to understand students’ goals for coming to the writing center and to politely facilitate the flow of the tutorial conversation. We will consider all of these types of questions in this article. We examined how questions function in a corpus of eleven writing center conferences conducted by experienced tutors. In these eleven conferences, we found a total of 690 questions, mostly asked by tutors but some asked by students as well. Incorporating research about questions in classroom teaching, we adapted a scheme for analyzing questions in tutorials that was developed by the psychologist and linguist Arthur C. Graesser and his associates. This scheme has been used to analyze questions in math, science, and other kinds of quantitative tutoring, with a range of students from elementary school to college (Golding, Graesser, & Millis; Graesser, Baggett, & Williams; Graesser, Bowers, Hacker, & Person; Graesser & Franklin; Graesser & McMahen; Graesser & Olde; Graesser & Person; Graesser, Person, & Huber; Graesser, Person, & Magliano; Graesser, Roberts, & Hackett-Renner; Person, Graesser, Magliano, & Kreuz). Through our analysis, we show how questions can function in writing center conferences so that we and our tutors can understand the potential impact of questions on students’ learning and, subsequently, pose questions more consciously. Previous research about questions in writing center conferences has focused on what questions reveal about tutors’ roles and control over conferences. For example, Kevin M. Davis, Nancy Hayward, Kathleen R. Hunter, & David Wallace analyzed four types of “conversational moves” (47) teachers use in classroom discourse—structuring the interaction, soliciting responses, responding, and reacting—to determine the extent to which tutors took on teacher roles. According to Davis, Hayward, Hunter, & Wallace, tutors are usually in control of conferences, but sometimes they do assume less teacher-like and more conversant-like roles (see also Willa Wolcott’s “Talking It Over: A Qualitative Study of Writing Center Conferencing”). Susan R. Blau, John Hall, & Tracy Strauss considered the nature of the collaboration that occurs in writing center conferences by analyzing “three recurring rhetorical strategies” (22) relating to tutors’ directiveness—questioning, echoing, and using qualifiers. They found that in conferences considered satisfactory, tutors 85891-Writing Center-text.indd 39 3/10/14 2:52 PM Thompson & Mackiewicz | Questioning in Writing Center Conferences 40 demonstrated “informed flexibility” (38) in the strategies they used. Other studies have evaluated tutors’ use of mitigated and unmitigated interrogatives (Thonus, “Dominance in Academic Writing Tutorials”), “question–answer interrogation sequences” (Thonus, “What Are the Differences” 231), and leading versus open questions (Severino). A few studies have included questions in analyzing tutors’ politeness strategies (Bell & Youmans) and self-presentation (Murphy). These studies of writing center conferences tend to analyze questions as signals of assumed role and that role’s concomitant right to control the discourse as opposed to examining all the ways questions can function—including but not restricted to the ways they help construct role and maintain control. We analyzed questions to determine the extent to which experienced tutors ask questions that push students’ thinking, check their understanding, facilitate conversation, and model the types of questions students should ask of themselves in order to assess and develop their own writing. Simultaneously, we speculated on the relationships between questioning and students’ and tutors’ roles. After delineating the question types we found, we examined question-answer patterns according to initiation-response-evaluation (IRE) instructional dialogue (Mehan), a classroom discourse pattern largely unexamined in writing center research (for an exception, see Porter). We examined writing center variations on the IRE pattern, showing how experienced tutors used different types of leading and scaffolding questions in tandem with common-ground questions in a cycle of promoting students’ thinking and engagement and of checking students’ comprehension.

In 2004, the University of Kansas (KU) launched an interdisciplinary Graduate Writing Program as part of a larger initiative to reduce time to degree rates and increase degree completion rates. Serving both domestic and international students, this program employs a rhetorical genre-based approach in a series of courses organized around the genres of graduate school and beyond. In these Graduate Studies courses, students become ethnographers of the research and writing practices of their disciplines while writing their own texts and developing their professional identities. In addition, the Graduate Writing Program fields a Summer Writing Institute and offers workshops for students. The program supports departments and faculty members through consultations and workshops on such topics as how to mentor graduate writing. This profile—part program description, part theoretical construct—outlines the history and structure of the program as well as the academic and cultural challenges that graduate students and their mentors face. It argues that rhetorical genre studies is ideally suited for teaching graduate writing and supporting students as they create their professional identities.

“Sharing” is a ubiquitous yet largely unexamined term in composition scholarship and practice. Scholars and teachers use the term widely to talk about practices such as peer review, collaboration, and student-teacher conferences, all of which have been used to support the relevance of composition as a social and communal act. Yet, as this article demonstrates, sharing has been aligned historically with assumptions and values that emphasize individual productivity at the cost of exploring the affective and ethical costs of social engagement and interaction. This article investigates tensions in the historical practices of sharing that create openings for alternative ways to understand and value the complex encounters writers undergo when they interact in the space of the writing classroom. Specifically, the article explores how sharing might be revised in composition studies to draw attention to the affective, corporeal, and ethical consequences of interpersonal contact.

This essay considers the long-standing challenges, in both practice and theory, to collaborative writing in the first-year classroom. I argue that Hannah Arendt’s concepts of plurality and natality are useful frameworks for thinking constructively and practically about teaching argumentative writing through collaboration. I explore these concepts in terms of foundational scholarship on written collaboration, such as Candace Spigelman’s work on writing groups and intellectual property, as well as recent considerations of evolving technological resources (Howard). Ultimately, thinking through Arendt, I offer examples from my own classroom practice, and also generate a series of questions designed to support instructors’ incorporation of collaborative writing and thinking across their own diverse contexts. My goal here is not to suggest that there is a singular “best practice,” but rather to demonstrate the ways in which Arendtian concepts can foster complex and scaffolded pedagogies of collaboration in the first-year classroom.

Reviewed are: Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Fitalicinism, and Public Policy Writing Rebecca Dingo Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600–1900 Jane Donawerth Fitalicinist Rhetorical Resilience Elizabeth A. Flynn, Patricia Sotirin, and Ann Brady, editors Writing a Progressive Past: Women Teaching and Writing in the Progressive Era— Lisa Mastrangelo— Fitalicinist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch

This November issue of RTE once again contains the Annual Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English, available only here, on the NCTE website.

Curriculum designers and literacy policymakers sometimes assume that variation in teaching practices can be minimized using scripted and standardized curriculum. While standards and common understandings can be helpful, scripted curricula ignore the fact that curriculum is an enacted practice orchestrated by individuals. While reading scholars have studied this issue, it has yet to be examined in writing studies. In a four-month ethnographic study, I examined how a kindergarten teacher interpreted scripted writing curriculum through enacted lessons. The interpretation problematizes the ideologies embedded within curricular scripts, including emphases on genre, mechanics, and printed texts. Analysis of child writing revealed a socially constructed practice in which genre, mechanics, and letters were tied to social intentions and meanings. While scripted curricula can confine teachers’ abilities to make responsive decisions, I document how the focal teacher translated curricular materials with students, thus creating space for official curriculum, teaching practices, and children’s writing to coexist. Such flexible spaces make room for both teacher and student voices in innovative and inventive writing pedagogies.

y copy of the first issue of Literacy in Composition Studies is thoroughly marked up.It engages issues, questions, and even anxieties I have carried with me over my roughly twenty years as a teacher and literacy researcher.In an effort to continue the conversation I am going to take up two themes that thread through many of the initial articles and their responses.The first theme regards the conceptual tropes we use to describe our work.The second relates to transformative potential and, equally as important, limitations of scholarship that is directed to providing access and opportunity to historically disenfranchised students and communities.This interest in equity is something I believe many share across the areas of Literacy Education and Composition and Rhetoric.In his opening essay, Bruce Horner argues for a shift from spatial to temporal metaphors in the conceptualization of literacies.Spatial metaphors risk essentializing literacy practices-exoticizing or romanticizing them-and even reproducing the very autonomous ideologies the field has worked so hard to deconstruct.A methodological focus on temporality may help researchers work through some of these contradictions (Horner 4-5).In a similar vein, many of the subsequent authors invoke the terms "purpose, " "labor, " "intentionality, " "process, " "circulation, " "work, " and "movement, " a historicizing direction that I for the most part endorse, and which seems to be in line with the empirical realities of global migrations and transnationalism.My qualification is because phrases like "emergent dynamism" shade into the discourse of neoliberal incursions into education, which valorize innovation, as there will always be new literacies, and literate identities, to market.A renewed emphasis on temporality may also exist in tension with another acknowledgement made by several of the contributors: that there is often, following Pierre Bourdieu, significant social inertia and reproduction in the field of education, even as we work within and against the system to try to expand what constitutes academic knowledge and practice.This tension can induce some self-reflection and soul searching for scholars who try to balance an analytical disposition, the pressures to generate new terms and ideas for the academic market, and the desire to make a difference in students' lives.My own contribution engages these themes from the vantage point of having taught and conducted research with elementary school students and their families in predominantly under-

Despite the fact that a considerable proportion of today’s writing programs operate according to the principles of genre-based instruction, research has not adequately dealt with the teaching of various genres (e.g., job application letters). Nor has research, to date, attempted to address the issue of written corrective feedback in conjunction with genre-based instruction. This study, therefore, aimed to investigate the impact of written corrective feedback in the context of genre-based instruction on job application letters. To this end, 120 Iranian advanced-level EFL learners at Kish Institute of Science and Technology participated in the present study. After administering the TOEFL test, 80 students scoring within ±1 SD of the mean score were randomly assigned to one of two experimental groups?namely, Direct Feedback Group or Indirect Feedback Group. Having sat a writing pretest, the participants received genre-based instruction on how to compose job application letters. Meanwhile, they were supplied with direct or indirect feedback on their writing. Following this instruction, a writing posttest was administered, the results of which showed that direct corrective feedback was more effective than indirect corrective feedback in the context of genre-based instruction on letters of job application.

This article highlights Education/Connection/Action (ECA), a locally developed community pedagogy deployed at a youth activism summer camp that served as a site for a community/academic teaching and research collaboration. Youth considered connections between a set of issues, including a local ban on Ethnic Studies, the School-to-Prison Pipeline, and Youth Sexuality, Health, and Rights. They drew from lived and learned literacies to inform participatory media projects that critically and creatively address restrictions on access to local knowledges and information with particular relevance to youth sexuality, health, and rights (broadly defined). In highlighting youth voices, desires, and needs across distinct youth communities, their collaborative productions demonstrate coalitional potential and a collective call for change.

In Slam School: Learning Through Conflict in the Hip-Hop and Spoken Word Classroom, Bronwen E. Low argues for the significance of critical hip-hop pedagogies, particularly when engaging with racial and social conflicts in educational settings. Low collaborated with a teacher at an urban arts magnet high school in the northeastern United States through a performance poetry course that was taught using a hiphop and spoken word curriculum. Overall, Low's book is useful for community literacy scholars as an application and assessment of a popular practice and growing pedagogy in schools and community organizations.

This essay provides an approach to teaching T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The approach is designed to disassociate the student from the annotation usually provided by either Eliot or an editor. The assignment is presented in multiple frameworks and hopes to make students deal with the poem’s specific lines. The process described has students identify voice shifts in the poem. It is certainly true that there are differing opinions about voice in The Waste Land, but the point of the assignment is not to involve the student in this debate (at least initially). The explicit pedagogical goal of the approach described in this essay is to enable students to develop their own views on the poem and to create a reading that is independent of editorial direction. This develops their ability to read critically and increases their comfort level with a difficult text.

Even if the United States remains mostly monolingual, it seems imperative—politically, economically, and ethically—that American college students begin to develop some understanding of the processes of translation. A focus on linguistic and cultural translation can serve as a fruitful approach for teaching early world literature, since students need some invitation to enter into a conversation with the reading and crave some sense of present relevance. Encountering a text in multiple English translations directs our attention away from an arrested sense of its existence in the past and toward a more dynamic sense of its present in cultural circulation.

Public writing spaces, such as blogs and social media sites, are expanding quickly with new websites, web applications, and other interfaces constantly available to users. As these digital composing spaces continue to expand, it is important that writers are capable of operating within them, yet many composition students lack the rhetorical awareness to present effective arguments in multimodal digital interfaces. To address this issue, the author designed a project to introduce students to public writing while reflecting on the implications of the permanence of their writing, the searchability of these public spaces, and their responsibility as writers. This project began by asking students to reflect on their own online personae, be it through Facebook profiles, personal blogs, or online class forums. Utilizing websites like Yelp and YouTube offered students the opportunity to see how others present themselves online and the effectiveness of composers in these digital spaces. Taught in an online course format, this project demonstrates how writing can live outside of the traditional classroom space and contribute to the students’ community. For the writing teacher, it creates the occasion to delve into students’ understandings of ethics in online writing while illustrating the rhetorical components necessitated by composing in digital media.

Why would an English professor enroll in an upper-level biology class? This article describes an experiment in interdisciplinarity: an English professor takes a class titled Scientific Imaging in order to enhance her teaching of nature writing. The author outlines thirteen specific lessons imparted by her experience as a student in a class devoted to photographing elements of the natural world and creating images suitable for scientific presentation, and then she explains how she adapted the principles from Scientific Imaging for use in a creative nonfiction class focusing on nature writing. The article concludes with a discussion of the results of this interdisciplinary experiment and suggestions for promoting interdisciplinary learning as a mode of faculty development.

In this article, Schiewer examines the idea of hospitality in the classroom, which she notes has garnered a little more attention in recent scholarship. Though some of these examinations are quite complex, Schiewer offers a simplified approach marked by three principal ideas: provide simple instruction, build community while maintaining authority, and “befriend” students. To illustrate how this might be accomplished in the classroom, Schiewer reviews ideas put forth by Jerry Farber and Marshall Gregory, who promote being fully present and engaged with students. Schiewer concludes that by actively engaging students and knowing how to fairly balance critique, the hospitable classroom is ultimately a productive one.

This article presents the authors’ innovative approach to the challenges of teaching students in a large lecture survey course to perform effective close readings, and sets forth a rigorous qualitative assessment of students’ learning. It describes a combination of teaching strategies integrated to encourage students’ skills acquisition as well as content mastery, and to make the course writing intensive without also being grading intensive. It demonstrates the effectiveness of these strategies by analyzing evidence of student learning. The authors advocate for an instructional model that gives students ample opportunity for active learning and for practicing close reading skills. The authors conclude with a brief coda calling for more scholarship and reflection on faculty-graduate student collaboration in both scholarship and teaching.

The article discusses the necessary compromises inherent in choosing interesting, authentic, and appropriate texts for Middle Eastern classrooms. With nine years’ experience teaching literature in the Arabian Peninsula, Risse argues that the choice of texts and the methods of teaching should reflect local culture instead of transplanting Western syllabi.

The effects of globalization on communication products and processes have resulted in document features and interactional practices that are sometimes difficult to describe within current theoretical frameworks of inter/transcultural technical communication. Although it has been recognized in our field that the old theoretical frameworks and assumptions are no longer adequate by themselves in the global workplace, to date no comprehensive theoretical framework has been suggested that is capable of encompassing hybrid characteristics of transcultural technical communication that emerge as a result of increased contact and connectivity. This article provides an interdisciplinary overview of Cosmopolitan theory and suggests that applying the cosmopolitan framework of Ulrich Beck to our research and the Dialogical Cosmopolitanism approach of Suresh Canagarajah to our pedagogical practices can move us towards a deeper understanding of global phenomena.

Integrating and using technology in the technical communication classroom is an ongoing interest and challenge for the field. Previous work tends to focus on best practices and other types of generalized advice, all of which are invaluable to teachers. But this article encourages teachers to also pay attention to sociotechnical forces and dynamics in local settings. It explains how a cartography of affect can be useful in demonstrating how technologies become imbued with meaning and significance in particular pedagog-ical contexts. The authors illustrate the value of this mapping practice through a case study of iPad integration and use in a technical communication service course and its teacher-training course. They also provide examples of heuristic questions that can guide critical cartography projects in local settings.

This study investigates politeness strategies within meetings of designers who met face-to-face and technical communicators who met via teleconference and, more specifically, politeness strategies of existing members toward group newcomers and vice versa. Based on the results of this study, I suggest that issues of power and social distance affect politeness strategies by both groups during their initial interactions and suggest that technical communication educators should better prepare students by teaching benefits, detriments, and realities of particular linguistic politeness choices.

Due to its favorable reception circa 1970, the essay “Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” has solidified Nietzsche's monumental status within the field of rhetoric and writing studies, allowing those inheriting this perspective to put the essay to use without attending to its intertextual background. This article argues that examining the intertextual reception of Nietzsche's essay will not only disclose an invisible, and hence unacknowledged rhetor—Arthur Schopenhauer—hiding in the shadows of Nietzsche's fragmentary essay; doing so will also reveal to what degree this monument's preservation requires its background to remain forgotten.

Teaching problem: Students' written assignments show that they tend to list ideas rather than provide evidence-based arguments. This might be because they do not have a framework to base their arguments on. Research question: Does the communication model framework help students to write evidence-based arguments when evaluating the communicative effectiveness in corporate blogs? Situating the case: The ability to engage in argument from evidence is one of the Next Generation Science Standards for scientific and engineering practices. Thus, it is important for engineering students to know how to present evidence-based arguments. The communication model framework was introduced to provide students with a framework to base their arguments on. This framework builds on the genre-based and academic literacies approaches to teaching writing. More companies are now using corporate blogs (an open, participatory, and globally networked social media tool) to engage stakeholders directly across multiple contexts. The framework is useful in analyzing evolving genres like corporate blogs because it is not only structured but also flexible. About the case: This teaching case describes the use of the communication model framework as the basis for students' arguments. The framework was used in a general writing course for engineering students. Working in groups, the students used the framework for their oral practice critique and their critique assignment on a given piece of academic writing or corporate blog. They also had to write a reflection paper individually at the end of the course. Results: Overall, the mixed groups and international students groups made a stronger attempt to apply the framework compared to the Singaporean student groups. The students' educational backgrounds, the group dynamics within the group, and the nature of the discussions affected the level of adoption of the framework in their writing. Conclusions: This teaching case reflects the value of mixed group, face-to-face discussions, and personal reflection in teaching students evidence-based writing, and calls for more research on flexible frameworks as genres evolve.

Reviewed are: Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-One Mentoring by Harry C. Denny. Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan. I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric by Frankie Condon. Logan A Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966, new ed. by Joseph Harris Language and Learning in the Digital Age by James Paul Gee and Elisabeth R. Hayes Contemporary Literature: The Basics by Suman Gupta The Changing of Knowledge in Composition: Contemporary Perspectives edited by Lance Massey and Richard C. Gebhardt

Beginning with this issue, Holly Hassel joins the editorial staff of TETYC in the role of associate editor. Holly’s essay “Research Gaps in Teaching English in the Two-Year College” [40:4 (May 2013), 343–63] provided an invaluable overview of more than a decade’s research as reported in TETYC. As associate editor, Holly will be contributing short essays under the heading “Inquiry” that focus onvarious aspects of the process of publishing research in the journal, research most commonly known as SoTL (the scholarship of teaching and learning). Our hope is that “Inquiry” will serve as an invitation to readers to join the ongoing SoTL conversation in these pages.

A program assessment project at our college suggests the importance of listening to every teacher’s account of the assessment practice and the value of ongoing conversation.

Recent translations of American Yiddish poetry into English have made an important chapter in American culture accessible both to the English scholar and to the literature student. Bringing together the work of two important literary groups of predominantly male poets with the work of one of the best-known female poets in Yiddish—whose aesthetic concerns overlapped with those of Euro-American modernism—I argue that the linguistic and aesthetic choices of Yiddish poetry in America not only bridge the distance between two geographies (the Old and New Worlds), but also forge a cultural scene for what I call immigrant geographies of being and belonging. Although the use of Yiddish limited the poems’ audience when they were published and, therefore, deferred aesthetic recognition of this under-studied body of poetry, I argue that the poets’ choice to write in Yiddish ultimately rendered a simultaneous desire to become American (in subject matter as well as in the adaptation of Yiddish verse to modern prosodic and aesthetic conventions) and to resist the pressure of the melting pot precisely by writing in a language inaccessible to the larger reading public. In this act of dissimilation, Yiddish poetry—like most writing in national languages published in the United States either by the immigrant or the mainstream press—poses challenges for the literary and cultural critic and teacher.

This essay examines the current state of online writing instruction in light of changing technologies and everyday literacies in order to understand their impact on access to higher education and on the material conditions of teaching writing.

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In a photo taken at the community college where my father Julian Medina taught, he’s wearing a tie and a middle-management, short-sleeved buttonup shirt, shaking hands with farm worker advocate César Chávez. As in my father’s proud image, I too work hard to project a professional appearance, often wearing a tie the first few weeks of the semester. I do so because of the often mistaken assumptions students make about my knowledge and the wisdom of assigning readings by writers of color. Unfortunately, this feeling of insecurity comes from lived experience. When my Anglo mother married my Mexican American father, her father disowned her. Even though my father had earned his bachelor’s degree and his master’s degree and taught English at a community college in central California, his accomplishments did little to diminish my grandfather’s racial prejudice. Before my father died in 2006 at the age of fifty-six, he often told me that I was supposed to surpass his success in the same way as he did with his accomplishment as the first in his family to graduate from college. He did this by changing the family trade of mowing lawns to instead teaching English at the college level.

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By challenging misconceptions about students and instructors at two-year campuses, this article critically examines practices of knowledge making in writing studies, arguing for the repositioning of writing instruction at two-year and open-admissions colleges from the margins to the center of the profession.

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This position paper proposes the undertaking of a systematic research agenda on the tangled questions of accessibility, technology, and disability from the perspective of Technical Communication field. O'Hara (2004), Oswal and Hewett (2013), Palmeri (2006), Porter (1997), Ray and Ray (1999), Salvo (2005), Slatin and Rush (2003), Theofanos and Redish (2003 and 2005), and Walters (2010), have approached accessibility issues in various Technical Communication contexts and have emphasized the need for more attention to accessibility in our research, teaching, and practice. Likewise, the major journals in our field-- Technical Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly and the IEEE Transactions in Professional Communication ---have also published at least one special issue EACH on the topic of accessibility. While all this sporadic research has appeared on accessibility-related topics in different venues, this research has not yet gained the type of traction one would generally expect from an area with such a growth potential. As a user-centered discipline, we also ought to remember that presently 57.8 million Americans have one or more disabilities. Among the U.S. veteran population alone, 5.5 million are disabled. And, if we consider the reach of our Technical Communication work via the World Wide Web, this planet has 1 billion people with disabilities who can be affected by our accessibility research (National Center for Disability, 2013).

This article argues that an understanding of writing as translingual requires a shift to a different orientation to literacy—i.e., from autonomous and situated to negotiated. Such an orientationtreats the text as co-constructed in time and space—with parity for readers and writers in shaping the meaning and form—and thus performed rather than preconstructed, making the multimodal and multisensory dimensions of the text fully functional. Going beyond the native/nonnative and monolingual/multilingual speaker binaries, this study demonstrates that both student groups can orient themselves to such literate practices in the context of suitable pedagogical affordances. Drawing from teacher research informed by an ethnographic perspective, the study identifies four types of negotiation strategies adopted by writers to code-mesh and readers to interpret texts: envoicing, recontextualization, interaction, and entextualization. Envoicing strategies set the conditions for negotiation, as it is a consideration of voice that motivates writers to decide the extent and nature of code-meshing; recontextualization strategies prepare the ground for negotiation; interactional strategies are adopted to co-construct meaning; and entextualization strategies reveal the temporal and spatial shaping of the text to facilitate and respond to these negotiations. The analysis points to the value of a dialogical pedagogy that can further develop the negotiation strategies students already bring to the classroom.

This article draws on a four-year practitioner research study of a university partnership with an all-boys public elementary school to analyze students’ socially situated literacy practices thatoccurred on the margins of a curriculum driven by high-stakes testing. We bring together critical literacy (Freire, 2007; Janks, 2010; Luke, 2000), realist theory (Alcoff, 2006; Mohanty, 1997;Moya, 2001), and Gramsci’s (1971) conception of the organic intellectual to provide a layered framework for understanding how students at our research site mobilized their cultural identitiesfor critical ends, what we define as “organic critical literacies.” Through illustrative examples of third- and fourth-grade African American boys’ interactions with fiction and nonfiction texts,we examine how students critiqued common ideologies that devalued them, their school, and their city, and enacted more humanizing visions. The elementary students whose work we featurewere realizing their capacities as emerging organic intellectuals, translating their singular critical insights and observations into a broader dialogue that had more universal resonance. Weconclude by discussing the educational, epistemological, and ethical implications of our study.

The use of online course or learning management system (LMS) tools proliferates as writing instruction grows online along with administrative concerns to improve teaching efficiencies and program assessment. While many institutions use the template feature in LMS systems (e.g. Blackboard Vista) to generate a location for teacher resources, some institutions are using LMS tools to standardize course content, delivery, and pedagogy to varying degrees. However, digital literacy issues that affect both teachers and students can negatively impact teaching and learning with LMS tools, especially in Web-based settings. It is important to understand how such tools may or may not be used effectively in standardizing writing pedagogy, particularly how designers’ unfamiliarity with course content and their own and their students’ inexperience with the tools can negatively affect pedagogy and learning with such tools. I describe a specific example of problems encountered within an extreme form of standardization in a Web-based writing course delivered via WebCT/Vista, identify implications of such standardization, and suggest considerations that educators should be aware of in their efforts to standardize writing pedagogy through LMS tools.

In this article, I extend the academic conversation about writing and identity by investigating the experiences of one adult student negotiating the transition between professional and academic communities and identities. Drawing on a framework articulated by Ivanic (1998), I examine the interaction between the writer’s autobiographical self, the socially available possibilities for self-hood, and the discoursal self the student constructs in a single instance of academic writing. I argue that the primary writerly identity this student constructs in his text is a workplace or professional identity and show how this identity is not entirely coherent but reflects the process of identity transition the student was facing on the job at the time. I use this case study to draw attention to the negotiations some adult students pursuing postsecondary study make, especially those with well-established workplace identities, as they face the challenge of composing new identities in academic settings. I further suggest that the challenge of identity negotiation is one faced by all writers, not just adults, and that this is a challenge we must account for in our teaching and research.

The life of an adjunct is never slow. This essay looks into the professional and personal life of a community college teacher working at multiple colleges who wonders, like many others, how she will hold it all together and provide the quality of teaching that her students deserve.

This editorial offers a snapshot view of current trends in writing pedagogy, with the intention of raising awareness of some substantial changes taking place in methodologies, student populations, and teachers of writing. These changes, which are not revolutionary in nature but rather represent evolutionary trends, are nonetheless fairly dramatic in terms of (1) shifting the center of gravity of the field away from the United States and the teaching of writing to native speakers of English; (2) bifurcating the field into schools with different orientations to written texts and different methodologies for research and teaching; (3) disarticulating writing from reading; (4) raising issues of author identity and ownership of texts; and (5) potentially lowering the status and quality of the teaching of writing.

Multiple studies on the relationship between lexical diversity and holistic writing quality in a second language (L2) have consistently shown that a greater number of unique lexical items, compared to the total number of words, is associated with better quality writing. The findings of such studies indicate the importance of vocabulary to L2 writing. However, they provide little information in terms of what vocabulary L2 writers need to learn in order to improve their writing. Despite its limited application in the mid to late 1990s, the use of lexical frequency profiles has not been developed as a method for analyzing the vocabulary of L2 writers’ texts and providing insight as to the vocabulary needed for developing L2 writers. This study constructed two lexical frequency profiles of texts written by a homogeneous group of Spanish-speaking learners of English. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to determine the contribution of more and less frequent lexical items to the participants’ holistic scores. The results indicated that word types which occur less frequently in the English language contributed significantly to the participants’ holistic scores, despite the relatively low frequency with which they were used in the participants’ essays. These results suggest not only the utility of lexical frequency profiles in teaching and researching L2 writing, but also that L2 writers may benefit from instruction using frequency information. Pedagogical implications are discussed in terms of how L2 writing instructors can incorporate lexical frequency information into direct vocabulary instruction.

We propose “instructional chaining” as an analytic method for capturing and describing key instructional episodes enacted by expert writing teachers to foster the recontextualization over time of the social practices of argumentative writing through process-oriented instructional approaches. The article locates instructional chaining within a sociocultural framework and argues for conceptualizing learning to write as the recontextualization of social practices of writing in classroom settings. To illustrate the use of instructional chaining to study the effects of teaching on learning argumentative writing, we describe the processes employed to construct an instructional chain for a unit of literary argumentation in a 12th grade English language arts classroom. We conclude with a discussion of two potential uses of instructional chains as units of analysis for both quantitative and qualitative analyses to study patterns of teaching and learning across many classrooms.

This contribution focuses on classroom discourse, and student evaluations thereof, in a specific tertiary EMT (English-medium teaching) setting. This is done by drawing on a rich, triangulated and longitudinal data base, comprising classroom interactional and ethnographic data that cover the whole duration of an international, four-semester English-medium hotel management programme (HMP) set in Vienna, Austria. On the basis of the discursive nature of learning it is argued that, in spite of the absence of any explicit language learning aims, the classroom discourse affords (language) learning spanning the functions of English as language for international hospitality purposes and of English as the lingua franca of the HMP community. Building on the recent discussions of EMT instructional types and of English used as a lingua franca in the international classroom, it is argued that the HMP represents a case of ‘implicit ICELF (integrating content and English as a lingua franca)'.

Effective ways of teaching technical communication skills to engineering students have been much discussed. This article reflects on one setting, a first year course in Technical Communication at a university in Sweden, where electrical engineering teachers, language and communication teachers and student counsellors work in close, team-based cooperation using a project model which requires the students to analyse, implement and communicate technical problems. The paper discusses the change in this course - from an EAP course primarily prioritizing language training which ran parallel with a project course - to one unified ICL course. The progression is described through the changes in the organization of the course, and the article focuses on one learning activity: interdisciplinary tutorials on project reports. Through a pilot study where these sessions were video recorded and mapped, we conclude that the presence of different roles became an asset for the range of what the students see as relevant for their project report. In particular, the technical report genre was critically analysed, including problematic areas such as textual sequencing and display of technical problems; data visualisation and commentary; and referencing.

Writing is a necessary skill for success in the classroom and the workplace; yet, many students are failing to develop sufficient skills in this area. One potential problem may stem from a misalignment between students' and teachers' criteria for quality writing. According to the evaluative misalignment hypothesis, students assess their own writing using a different set of criteria from their teachers. In this study, the authors utilize automated textual analyses to examine potential misalignments between students' and teachers' evaluation criteria for writing quality. Specifically, the computational tools Coh-Metrix and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) are used to examine the relationship between linguistic features and student and teacher ratings of students' prompt-based essays. The study included 126 students who wrote timed, SAT-style essays and assessed their own writing on a scale of 1-6. Teachers also evaluated the essays using the SAT rubric on a scale of 1-6. The results yielded empirical evidence for student-teacher misalignment and advanced our understanding of the nature of students' misalignments. Specifically, teachers were attuned to the linguistic features of the essays at both surface and deep levels of text, whereas students' ratings were related to fewer overall textual features and most closely associated with surface-level features.