This article describes an interdisciplinary partnership that resulted in the introduction of a writing coach into an MBA class on critical and analytical thinking. By examining the response to this role by the writing coaches themselves and by the students enrolled in three sections of this new course, this exploratory study endeavors to answer the question: How can a writing coach best support student writing in an MBA course? Major findings are that students predominantly liked receiving written feedback and mini-lectures by the writing coaches, mini-lectures were met with mixed reviews, and there was a strong perception by participants that their writing had improved.

Many EAL (English as an Additional Language) scholars enlist text mediators’ support when faced with the challenges of writing for international publication. However, the contributions these individuals are able to make in improving scientific manuscripts remains unclear, especially when language professionals such as English teachers do this work. In this article, we explore this topic by examining how three mediators employed their very different expertise and brought different processes to bear on the same discussion section of a medical manuscript written by a novice scholar in China. We find that successfully mediated texts are often the result of an interplay between the mediator’s expertise and the relationship between the participants. Our findings contradict those of previous studies that question the role of English teachers in this process and have the potential to inform both text mediation practices and revision studies.

This study addresses the current debate about the beneficial effects of text processing software on students with different working memory (WM) during the process of academic writing, especially with regard to the ability to display higher-level conceptual thinking. A total of 54 graduate students (15 male, 39 female) wrote one essay by hand and one by keyboard. Our results show a beneficial effect of text processing software, in terms of both the qualitative and quantitative writing output. A hierarchical cluster analysis was used to detect distinct performance groups in the sample. These performance groups mapped onto three differing working memory profiles. The groups with higher mean WM scores manifested superior writing complexity using a keyboard, in contrast to the cluster with the lowest mean WM. The results also point out that more revision during the writing process itself does not inevitably reduce the quality of the final output.

Writing is a complex, recursive, and strategic process that requires metacognitive competencies. Skillful writers have a high level of metacognitive strategy knowledge (MSK) and use strategies effectively. MSK about writing describes a person’s verbalizable knowledge and awareness of memory, comprehension, and higher order processes that underlie skillful writing. Measurement instruments assessing students’ MSK about academic writing in higher education that can be used for group settings and large samples are lacking. The aim of this article is to describe the development of a new MSK test instrument. The MSK test consists of three different writing scenarios related to the three self-regulated writing phases: planning prior to composing full text, monitoring the writing during composition, and subsequent revision. The findings of a pre-study (N = 51) and two studies (N = 23; N = 113) showed that the new MSK test is economical in use, is reliable and has high content validity. Further, the findings demonstrated external validity of the new instrument in terms of relationships with students’ metacognitive strategy use and writing performance. Implications for future research and educational practice are discussed.

In this paper a dialogue game for critical discussion is developed. The dialogue game is a formalisation of the ideal discussion model that is central to the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. The formalisation is intended as a preparatory step to facilitate the development of computational tools to support the pragma-dialectical study of argumentation. An important dimension of the pragma-dialectical discussion model is the role played by speech acts. The central issue addressed in this paper is how the speech act perspective can be accommodated in the formalisation as a dialogue game. The starting point is an existing ‘basic’ dialogue game for critical discussion, in which speech acts are not addressed. The speech act perspective is introduced into the dialogue game by changing the rules that govern the moves that can be made and the commitments that these result in, while the rules for the beginning, for the end, and for the structure of the dialogue game remain unchanged. The revision of the move rules is based on the distribution of speech acts in the pragma-dialectical discussion model. The revision of the commitment rules is based on the felicity conditions that are associated with those speech acts.

Welcome to the first issue of the third volume year of the Journal of Response to Writing. We are very encouraged by the positive response from readers to our previous issues and are excited to share several excellent contributions in this collection. Before introducing those articles, we want to also welcome you to our first issue published under new editorship. Dana Ferris has rejoined the general editorial board while Grant Eckstein and Betsy Gilliland have been appointed as the new coeditors of the journal.

Studies that have reported delayed positive effects for written corrective feedback (WCF) have typically targeted the use of articles for first- and subsequent- mention functions, using narrowly focused corrections that lack ecological validity. Not much is known about how different grammatical features react to mid-focused and unfocused WCF options, which enjoy more ecological validity. This study investigates the delayed effect of different types of WCF on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ accurate use of three features of English grammar (articles, infinitive, and unreal conditional). Four groups of participants (N = 77) were treated with different feedback options (mid-focused corrections, unfocused corrections, unfocused corrections plus revision, and no corrective feedback). WCF did not produce lasting accuracy gains, nor did it help corrected students outperform uncorrected students on a delayed posttest.

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.

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.

From 2012 to 2015, the online grammar program Grammarly was claimed to complement writing center services by 1. increasing student access to writing support; and 2. addressing sentence-level issues, such as grammar. To test if Grammarly could close these two gaps in writing center services, this article revisits the results of a Spring 2014 study that compared Grammarly' s comment cards to the written feedback of 10 asynchronous online consultants. The results showed that both Gram-marly and some consultants strayed from effective practices regarding limiting feedback, avoiding technical language, and providing accurate information about grammatical structure. However, the consultants' weaknesses could be addressed with enhanced or focused training, and their strengths allowed for important learning opportunities that enable student access to information across mediums and help students establish connections between their sentences and the larger whole. This article concludes that each writing center should consider their own way of closing these gaps and offers suggestions for multiple consultation genres, new services, and strategies for sentence-level concerns.

While students learn valuable skills by composing multimodal works, these assignments can also help students master traditional writing genres by defamiliarizing some of the "design choices" they make when writing. Requiring students to revise a traditional written essay into a video accomplishes two key goals in both lower level and advanced writing classes. It updates writing curricula to provide students experience with the kind of writing they will do in other classes. Furthermore, reflecting on the revision process enhances student appreciation for the importance of clear prose, careful exposition, and logical organization.

To investigate a diverse sample of adolescent writers’ experiences with disciplinary writing, this study compared 66 adolescents’ perceptions of writing through an analysis of interviews as part of a national study. Grounded in a social constructivist framework that stresses the role of agency in the development of writing competence, the study aims to examine factors – including language background and prior writing experiences – that are associated with adolescents’ perceptions of their writing development. The study asked: How do L1 and L2 adolescents’ perceptions of writing development compare? To what extent, if at all, is agency implicated in patterns of variation? Results of the comparative analysis suggest that varying affordances and constraints, and combinations of these, relate to adolescents’ expressed agency toward writing. Affordances include opportunities to select personally relevant subjects and to develop writing through feedback and revision processes; constraints include the use of highly structured writing scaffolds, formulas, and tightly constrained topics. Implications for differentiated scaffolding of writing instruction that might affectively and cognitively engage diverse adolescent learners are discussed.

This essay extends efforts to facilitate emotional–material frameworks of rhetoric informed by strides in rhetorical and biological studies respectively. Specifically, I examine Edwin Black’s theory of exhortation in light of neurological theories of affect, emotion contagion, and embodiment. I argue Black’s theory offers a prescient precursor to emotional–material rhetoric but also demands revision in light of recent advances in neuroscience. I present two claims. First, I argue emotionally grounded rhetoric can exhort emotional–discursive connections and preference judgments absent the need to convert emotional experiences into formal beliefs. Second, I argue physiological indicators are at least as important as verbal discourse in facilitating emotional exhortation. Finally, I conclude with some theoretical implications for the emotional–material study of rhetoric.

Peer assessment is a technique with many possible benefits for instruction across the curriculum. However, the value obtained from receiving peer feedback may critically depend upon the relative abilities of the author and the reviewer. We develop a new model of such relative ability effects on peer assessment based on the well-supported Flower and Hayes model of revision processes. To test this model across the stages of peer assessment from initial text quality, reviewing content, revision amount, and revision quality, 189 undergraduate students in a large, introductory course context were randomly assigned to consistently receive feedback from higher-ability or lower-ability peers. Overall, there were few main effects of author ability or reviewer ability. Instead, as predicted, there were many interactions between the two factors, suggesting the new model is useful for understanding ability factors in peer assessment. Often lower-ability writers benefitted more from receiving feedback from lower-ability reviewers, while higher-ability writers benefitted equally from receiving feedback from lower-ability and higher-ability reviewers. This result leads to the practical recommendation of grouping students by ability during peer assessment, contrary to student beliefs that only feedback from high ability peers is worthwhile.

This study investigated how struggling adult writers solve a writing task and what they know about writing and themselves as writers. The writing process of the adult writers was examined by combining three elements: the observation of collaborative writing tasks, analyses of their written texts, and structured individual interviews that included both retrospective and prospective parts. This methodical approach provides productive tools to assess writing processes and writing knowledge of struggling adult writers. The triangulation of data from the different sources is visualized in a case study. Findings from the case study suggest both similarities and differences between struggling adult and younger writers. Concerning the writing process of both groups, planning and revision play a limited role. However, alongside these similar limitations in their writing process, struggling adult writers distinguish themselves from their young counterparts through their relatively extensive knowledge about themselves as writers.

This article uses Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to explore how literature instructors can use eighteenth-century novels, many of which bring attention to themselves as creations of the writing process, to encourage their students to reflect on their position as writers in the twenty-first century. Gulya proposes teaching Tristram Shandy and other self-referential texts within the context of writing studies. This approach helps our students recognize the close relationship between writing and cognition and, by so doing, brings their attention to writing as a process as well as a product. Gulya also outlines some of the major benefits of encouraging students to think about writing as a process, including more vibrant peer-revision sessions and an increase in students' tendencies to take intellectual risks in their writing.

The purpose of this article is to share how classroom incorporation of technology with feminist pedagogy in mind both elicited and constrained learning opportunities in a large, blended class setting. Technology selection, assignment revision, and changes to teaching practices are addressed. We conclude with recommendations for teachers facing similar circumstances.

In a demanding engagement, James L. Kastely offers an exquisite reading, even revision, of the Republic, and through nuanced attention to form, absences, and tangents he begins to answer a methodological question that I have had for a while (Lyon). The Gorgias ends with a failed elenchus, when no one will continue, and then in a methodological shift after the Republic’s first chapter, Plato makes explicit his dissatisfaction with elenchus. Rather than ignore what seemingly stopped Plato twice, Professor Kastely explicates a new, more dialogical method by reading the Republic as rhetorical theory (x, xii). The new method and theory are performed in answering the question of whether it possible to have a political discourse that is not simply a displaced pursuit of private interest (3). Through meticulous reading, Kastely explicates Plato’s rhetorical method from the movement between the performative, mimetic Republic, which concedes the multitude, and the ideal, contemplative Kallipolis, which unifies everything, even gender.Between the two, Kastely locates Platonic persuasion: “Persuasion … can be extended and deepened to being understood as the opportunity and responsibility to shape one’s identity. Persuasion now can be understood as a practice of individual and political constitution” (220).Constituting persuasion does not manipulate the other, but works to change desire and the internal constitution of the individual. That is, this persuasion remakes desires, values, and identities (Frankenstein’s operation). Kastely considers reconstitution as dialogic and participatory and thus better than manipulative, orator-centric persuasion in that re-constitutive persuasion alters and expands “our understanding of what constitutes political discourse” to include foundational values (10–11). Intriguing as this is, I need further evidence for the dialogic nature of constituting persuasion, particularly because it is not achieved through deliberation, but through erasing alternative desires. Given Socrates’ discursive control, belief in Plato’s commitment to dialogue remains difficult, and when I consider the two states together, the Republic and Kallipolis, I instead find that the new method arises through doubleness, a double logos that destabilizes wisdom and sends a frustrated, skeptical reader questing. I offer two examples of Plato’s unresolvable doubleness.In addition to passive spectators, Kastely notes “the creators of discourse” and “the audiences who can listen to or read that discourse with a critical awareness” (xiii). He then develops a theory of cultural criticism for the non-philosopher, but the hierarchy of the philosopher and non-philosopher creates a doubleness, demanding critique from Plato’s critical readers. Even critical readers are not creators of discourse (rhetoricians?): readers do not represent their desires or create discourse, nor do they constitute their own identity or the state’s. Perhaps Kastely finds evidence for Plato’s constitution of “an audience who can rethink its cultural heritage” (80), but would truly critical readers accept the privilege of philosophers who deny their ability to create? The binary of reading and creating seemingly would frustrate truly critical readers. Would they not desire to create?Another doubleness: If mimesis is banned from the ideal state of Kallipolis, then what is its place in the performance of the state of Republic? Kastely writes mimesis into the state, reading The Republic as epic poetry, and hence he reads the dialogic state of Republic in relationship and preference to the monologic Kallipolis. Yet critical ironies abound in the tension between the imagined Kallipolis and the narrated, multifaceted state of Republic. Let me quickly, and perhaps fairly, trace Kastely’s argument for mimesis. He sees Plato’s difficulty with imitative poetry as an interpretive tension between mimetic entertainment and rhetorical, critical reading, writing “(t)o read the Republic rhetorically requires a reader to go beyond the surface and to understand the issues that the surface text both represents and distorts” (112). Ignoring the critique of poetry as counterfeit reality, Kastely argues that the right kind of reading leads to philosophical truth. Mimesis works pedagogically: in the Republic, “the rhetorical action of the dialogue” is “an enactment of persuasion that provides guidance on how to use poetry rhetorically to effect practical and individual change” (62). That is, the audience should read the Republic’s mimesis as an enactment of persuasive technique, not as drama, for Plato would “undo or minimize” cultural influences by acknowledging the rhetoricity of all discourse (79, 101). In Kastely’s epic Republic, readers engage the dialogue’s narrative, and it “educate(s) them on how to interrogate works of cultural rhetoric” (62). Readers thus become suspicious of the forces shaping their souls, moving away from shared culture toward self-cultivation. But do rhetorical reading and self-cultivation save mimesis? Do they respond to or change common culture? Can’t self-cultivation remove a citizen from common concerns and the polity? Is rhetorical reading the controlled action by which critical readers are separated from the creators of discourse? Doesn’t reception differ from production?Kastely appreciates Plato’s desire for a skeptical reader, and his rhetorical reader is a provocative concept, but he tends to interpret the Republic through dialogic resolution and logical consistency. Might I suggest that Plato is sometimes better read sophistically through contradiction, paradox, and bivalence? In doubleness, Plato violates his own dictates. For example, Socrates defends true philosophers through a tale of low, counterfeit reality. He tells the silly tale of a blind, deaf, and ignorant ship owner faced with sailors wrangling to be captain (488). Seeking the job, the argumentative sailors deny any need for knowledge of sailing. Consequently a false definition—captain as a windbag—emerges. Plato calls this analogy, compiled “out of lots of different elements, like the goat-stags and other compound creatures painters come up with” (488a). Analogy perhaps, but also narrative, full of bad behaviors (including murder), an extreme counterfeit reality: in offering such a tale, Plato assumes his audience is already able to critique mimesis, avoid categorical mistakes, and modulate their identifications with bad characters. He assumes that the dialogic pedagogy has worked or is unnecessary, and perhaps he tests our skeptical ability to read goat-stag extremes.Kastely’s systemic reading of the entire Republic brilliantly draws attention to Plato’s performative method, revitalizing and embodying Platonic rhetoric, but it understates Plato’s doubleness, playfulness, puzzlement, and skepticism. Plato, with his longing for total revolution and his fractured fairy tales, is the writerly critic of writing; the dramatic censor of plot, setting, and character; and the myth-teller who denounces mimesis. Given Plato’s denials and dissatisfactions, his doubleness, tensions, and contradictions, Kastely rightly reads him for performance and rhetoricity and wisely confronts the two states, Kallipolis and Republic. Without a doubt, this book begins another millennium of Platonic delight.

One hundred and three (N=103) peer review studies contextualized in L2 composition classrooms and published between 1990 and 2015 were reviewed. To categorize constructs in research studies, this researcher used Lai’s (2010) three Ps dimensions (perceptions, process, and product). Perceptions are the beliefs and attitudes of peer review. Process refers to the learning process or implementation procedures of peer review. Product is the learning outcomes of peer review. A thematic analysis of the studies’ constructs showed that perception studies examined learners’ general perceptions/attitudes, Asian students’ perceptions/attitudes (cultural influences), and learner perceptions of peer feedback in comparison to self and/or computerized feedback. Process studies discussed the effects of training, checklists/rubrics, writer-reviewer relationships, the nature of peer feedback, communicative language, timing of teacher feedback on peer feedback, grouping strategies, as well as communicative medium. Product research, on the other hand, investigated peer feedback adoption rates and ratio of peer-influenced revisions, effects of peer review on writers’ revision quality, effects of peer review on reviewers’ gains, and effects of peer review on writers’ self revision. In light of this review, research gaps are identified and suggestions for future research are offered.

The purpose of this study was to examine how six middle-school students used Automated Essay Evaluation (AEE) technology to revise their writing. Students in a combined 7th and 8th grade Literacy class at one school participated in two in-depth think alouds and semi-structured interviews as they used AEE technology to revise their writing on two separate writing tasks. Constant-comparative analysis of data, including think alouds, semi-structured interviews, and student writing along with a separate quantitative analysis of student revisions revealed themes in three areas: (a) student use of AEE feedback to make revisions; (b) student motivation to revise their writing when using AEE technology; (c) and student understanding and application of AEE feedback during revision. Findings indicated that students who received low scores used AEE feedback to prompt non-surface revisions whereas students with high scores did not. Further, students who used AEE feedback to prompt non-surface revisions made more overall non-surface revisions, revised for different reasons, made more t-unit level revisions, and had more revisions rated as major successes than students who did not use the feedback. Students who used the AEE feedback, MY Editor, were often confused by the grammar and punctuation feedback and had a low success rate using it. However, students were more successful with the spell checker only feedback. In addition, findings show that students were motivated to revise because of the numerical scores the technology assigned their writing. Moreover, knowledge that they would receive a score prompted students to do extensive revising prior to submitting their writing for scoring. Finally, student understanding of the AEE feedback was varied. Implications for classroom use of AEE technology and directions for future research are discussed.

This article describes a sequence of assignments to guide students through an informed effort at making contributions to Wikipedia that persist, and suggests ways this set of exercises in social informatics may also serve a number of common goals in a variety of writing, literature, and other courses: analyzing and writing for explicit editorial guidelines (“standards” in information science, “house style” in editorial practice); understanding, conforming to, and even negotiating conventions of genres and subgenres; collaborating online; writing for an audience that not only is real but also talks back; and developing deep understanding of revision and the writing, editorial, and publication processes. Students first learn Wikipedia policies and practices and analyze the historical development of articles before they make contributions. The pedagogical opportunities arguably outweigh the concerns of those who doubt the credibility of an open-authored encyclopedia.

It’s exciting to already be introducing the first issue of our second volume year of this new journal! We’ve been receiving positive feedback on volume 1 and great contributions for this and upcoming issues. In this issue, we present two research articles and two teaching articles. In the first piece, “Papers are Never Finished, Just Abandoned: The Role of Written Teacher Comments in the Revision Process.” M. Sidury Christiansen and Joel Bloch examine the delicate dynamics occurring between teachers’ written comments and subsequent revisions. Their study follows four students receiving written comments from one teacher over a series of three papers and two revisions per paper. The four students were postgraduate science or engineering students, all international students taking an ESL writing course at a university in the U.S. The teacher feedback took the form of marginal comments using the Microsoft Word® Comments tool as well as an add-on set of macros allowing the teacher to standardize commonly made comments (and customize them as needed).

The debate over the efficacy of written teacher comments has raised a variety of questions for consideration by both researchers and practitioners. Teachers can use written comments, in Vygotsky’s (1978) framework, to scaffold the development of student writing. By reflecting on his or her own commenting process, a teacher can assess and modify his or her comments as well as the method by which the comments are delivered. This study examines how four second-language (L2) students responded to comments on a series of three papers. The results show that students overwhelmingly followed the strategy training given during class on how to respond to teacher’s comments; however, the strategies used to make changes did not always result in a positive revision. While students believed they followed the teacher’s suggestions, they did not always pay attention to the paper as a whole, which resulted in problems with coherence or grammar, and even instances of plagiarism. Results indicate that strategy training does not guarantee an outcome of successful revision. This suggests that revision will be more effective for student paper development if understood as part of the creative process of writing rather than mere error correction. Based on these results, several proposals are made for modifying the comment process.

This issue completes the second volume year of JRW. It is hard to believe how quickly the two years have gone by, and we are gratified with the excellent work that authors have shared with us and with the positive response from readers. This issue has five papers—two research articles, two teaching articles, and a book review—which notably discuss response topics from a broad range of pedagogical contexts. With the publication of Magda Tigchelaar’s article, “The Impact of Peer Review on Writing Development in French as a Foreign Language,” we are happy to extend our discussions of response to writing to the teaching of languages other than English. Comparing the effects of peer review and self-review over a semester, Tigchelaar found that student writers were more likely to attend to/apply suggestions from their own self-reviews than they were to incorporate suggestions from their peers. She also found that peers were more likely to emphasize global concerns such as organization, and self-reviewers were more interested in fine-tuning at the sentence level and across sentences (cohesion). In particular, the study argues for a meaningful and increased role for guided self-feedback in writing instruction: “Learning how to review one’s own texts may require more time and training, but this initial investment may plant the seeds for more effective development of autonomous writers.”

In addition to other unfortunate circumstances, teacher response that comes in the form of negative, generic, and unintelligible commentary causes students to become alienated from writing. This problematic response often results from the lack of supportive student-centered response pedagogies within the first-year composition classroom. In an attempt to prevent additional writerly estrangement and to undo students’ isolation from the writing process, this article explores Marshall Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication theory as a potential framework for a dialogic, compassionate writing response pedagogy.

This study considers five different tutor note styles and reports on how the three primary audiences for such notes -student writers, faculty, and tutors -assess their efficacy in terms of length, voice, purpose, and content. Surveys and focus groups reveal that all stakeholders take tutor notes seriously and that collectively they prefer notes that are about a paragraph long, address students directly in the second-person, maintain an institutional rather than colloquial voice, and include a detailed summary and revision plan. To put this study in context, the article also traces the history of writing center scholarship on session reports.

As Brian Huot and Ellen E. Schendel assert, when assessment has more than validation in mind, it “can become a means for proactive change” (208). In response to this idea of assessment as an optimistic and opportunistic enterprise, this article describes how the structural design of our “equal opportunity” writing program and our faculty-led assessment process work symbiotically to sustain, enhance and “revision” the curriculum and pedagogy of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, first-year writing program. Our writing program strives to offer all students at the college a consistent and equivalent writing experience, regardless of what semester or in what section they enroll, as well as a coherent trajectory, where students encounter similar learning processes and literacy tasks throughout the course sequence. To ensure this consistency and coherence, our programmatic stakeholders designed program assessment to have direct impact on classroom learning by following multiple formative and summative assessments in an inquiry-based practice driven by local curricular contexts. In profiling the quid pro quo between writing program design and its accompanying assessment efforts, we demonstrate how program structure enables useful, progressive assessment, and, conversely, how assessment continuously informs and improves the infrastructures of pedagogy and curriculum in the writing classroom.

It has been established that in the Netherlands, as in other countries, a majority of students do not attain the desired level of writing skills at the end of elementary school. Time devoted to writing is limited, and only a minority of schools succeed in effectively teaching writing. An improvement in the way writing is taught in elementary school is clearly required. In order to identify effective instructional practices we conducted a meta-analysis of writing intervention studies aimed at grade 4 to 6 in a regular school setting. Average effect sizes were calculated for ten intervention categories: strategy instruction, text structure instruction, pre-writing activities, peer assistance, grammar instruction, feedback, evaluation, process approach, goal setting, and revision. Five of these categories yielded statistically significant results. Pairwise comparison of these categories revealed that goal setting (ES = 2.03) is the most effective intervention to improve students’ writing performance, followed by strategy instruction (ES = .96), text structure instruction (ES = .76), peer assistance (ES = .59), and feedback (ES = .88) respectively. Further research is needed to examine how these interventions can be implemented effectively in classrooms to improve elementary students’ writing performance.

Reviews 437 proposta d identificazione dell autore di questa declamazione con uno dei piu importanti maestri di retorica del tempo: Mario Vittorino. Conformemente ai criteri delle Edizioni dell'Universita di Cassino, entrambi i volumi propongono delle traduzioni che combinano felicemente limpidezza espressiva e riproduzione delle peculiaritá dello stile declamato­ rio, spesso aspro ed ellittico. Entrambi propongono poi un apparato biblio­ gráfico ricco e di grande ntilita, aggiornato al 2013. Si tratta nel complesso di due opere che riescono a coniugare con grande armonía la ricchezza e profonditá del commento filológico con una puntúale trattazione e contestualizzazione anche di problematiche di carattere piu generale. L'argomentazione e sempre esaustiva e di grande chiarezza . Grazie a queste doti tanto il Matheniaticus curato da Stramaglia, quanto il Sepulcnini incantation curato da Schneider risultano al tempo stesso un prezioso strumento di lavoro per gli specialisti e un valido mezzo di diffusione delle declamazioni presso un pubblico studentesco purtroppo ancora raramente sensibilizzato verso questo tipo di testi. Ai i ssandra Rolle, Université de Lausanne James Crosswhite, Deep Rhetoric: Philosophy, Reason, Violence, Justice, Wisdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. 424. Cloth $105.00, paper $35.00 ISBhf(paper) 9780226016481 There is a narrative that portrays rhetoric as an often-maligned theory of human discourse, educational regime, and practice. It is a superficial narra­ tive that has been under increasing assault since the new rhetoric's birth dur­ ing the 1920s and 30s. I. A. Richards and Kenneth Burke began the revision with novel conceptions of rhetoric as a social practice; Richard McKeon, Henry W. Johnstone, Ch. Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, and Ernesto Grassi advanced it in mid-century with reflections on rhetoric as at the core of philosophy (or philosophy of a certain sort); by late century John Poulakos and Takis Poulakos, among others, were rebuffing the subjugation of rhetoric to philosophy with an aesthetic interpretation based on a recuperation of the elder sophists' vision; and in this century scholars such as Diane Davis and Thomas Rickert continue the assault with formulations that carry rhetoric beyond the human and into such domains as the ambience of materiality. Although these thinkers conceptualize the new rhetoric from divergent start­ ing points and in different frames, they share a common desire to disclose what lies beneath a facile rendition of rhetoric as mere persuasion, namely its abiding centrality to what makes us human. This is the animus of James Crosswhite's Deep Rhetoric. Beginning with the observation that "we are rhe­ torical beings, and through rhetoric we give ways of being to each other and receive them from each other" (p. 17), Crosswhite seeks to understand how ordinary rhetoric, whereby we seek to influence and provide direction, assu­ mes a world with "dimensions of rhetoric that allow individuals, societies, 438 RHETORICA human activities, and the world itself to take place—and so brings the very possibility of philosophy and science into its realm" (p. 17). This is the realm of deep rhetoric, a realm that plumbs the depth of what makes us human and aligns with a transcendent aspiration of the new rhetoricians that by striving to understand rhetoric as an intellectual, educational, political, and social pur­ suit we will come to better understand the human condition. Deep Rhetoric has as its subtitle a list of terms that serve as its organizing discussions: Philosophy, Reason, Violence, Justice, Wisdom. These are not ran­ dom choices. At its core, Crosswhite's book is concerned with the central problem that has been to the fore of rhetorical thought since World War I: overcoming through public argument the quest by power to gain a monopoly on violence and to use its monopoly to dominate others. Deep Rhetoric seeks a worldly stance open to and that opens the possibihty for transcending the narrow logoi of instrumental rationality, logoi constituting the calculus of a system logic that dehumanizes others by excluding those dimensions of pathos and ethos that make humanity and community possible. The book opens with a consideration of what deep rhetoric means. Crosswhite draws contrasts between historicist views that position rhetoric in terms of its origins at a specific time and under specific conditions, such as...

This paper, building on results from a large online embedded language and literacy development project, introduces the notions of ‘cohesion’ and ‘coherence’ in feedback and outlines steps that instructors can take to provide such feedback in their own contexts. Cohesion in feedback can be defined in terms of its goals, audience, and organisation; and coherence in terms of how instances of feedback work together to scaffold a student into developing a deeper understanding of issues in their writing. The paper argues that feedback which is cohesive and coherent is not a collection of reactions to student’s errors/mistakes, but it is a thoughtfully and carefully drafted text which responds to a student’s writing based on an assessment of their needs. The paper includes an evaluation of how students respond to such feedback by sharing examples of students’ drafts, the feedback they received, and their responses to the feedback. This paper helps us in understanding the nature of feedback as well as understanding how to apply it with the goal of making our students stronger, more independent, and self-regulating writers.

Although many second language writing classes use a process approach, anecdotal evidence suggests that assessment of writing in such classes often still focuses on the written product alone. This assessment practice continues despite specialists having recommended that both process and product be assessed. This study compares second-year university students in Japan who were assessed on feedback processes and product with others assessed on product alone in terms of perceptions of the feedback received. Perceptions were determined through a post-treatment questionnaire. Neither the assessment of the use of teacher feedback in revisions nor the assessment of the quality and quantity of peer feedback was found to have a clear benefit in terms of students’ perceptions of the feedback received. This finding suggests the need for further research to confirm whether the assessment of both process and product is worth the considerable time investment required.

This quasi-experimental study examined the efficacy of the three types of written corrective feedback (WCF), namely, direct, indirect and coded WCF, and the no-correction approach. A diary study on student responses to WCF was also conducted. The one-semester investigation involved 68 Thai students in an undergraduate English course. Results showed that the three WCF types had significantly better revision effects than the no-correction approach, but only the coded WCF produced significant delayed effect. However, analyses of diary entries suggested no general accuracy improvement in any group. Diary study results indicated that, although all groups reported awareness of similar actions, and positive attitudes towards WCF, the coded WCF group seemed more aware of the WCF than the other groups. Findings suggest that focused coded WCF helps in learning English as an L2, although its role in L2 acquisition remains to be seen.

This essay details the foundational theory as well as the practical problems that led to the creation of this class project that focuses on authentic audience and persistent revision practices. The author won a Diana Hacker Award.

In Portuguese higher education, teachers from different scientific areas recognize that their students have difficulties with writing. Nevertheless, preparing students for academic writing is not a priority and any intervention depends more on the interest of particular teachers than on any institutional policy. The development of a more institutional approach to academic writing in Portugal will imply a deeper knowledge of the multifaceted reality of the students’ situation, involving identification of their own perceptions of their writing processes and of the academic writing practices they are subject to. This is the aim of our study, based on 1150 students’ answers to a questionnaire about literacy practices in Portuguese higher education.Our results show that students seem to be conscious of the procedural nature of writing and of the role and importance of planning, composing and reviewing in the course of their writing processes. As for their perceptions about institutional interventions aimed at fostering writing abilities and teacher feedback on their written work, the answers to the questionnaire allow us to conclude that such support is not frequently offered. There are, however, some differences in the way these issues are considered across the various fields of study.

The Millennial Generation presents a unique set of challenges to the classroom, including the desire to multi-task and teamwork as well as a strong need for attention and validation. Frequently, this creates a conflict between the students’ current skills and the teacher’s expectations when it comes to drafting and revision efforts. Restructuring traditional peer response methods into a group conferencing method allows students to utilize their current strengths while building skills necessary for later writing assignments. By participating in a six-step activity that occurs during a seventy-five minute class period, students are asked to listen, read, write, respond, discuss, and apply writing techniques. Over the semester, the author finds that students are invited into the writing discourse by developing vocabulary representative of global writing issues (development, transitions, paragraph structure, etc.) as well as that of grammar and mechanics. In the process, students learn how to trust their instincts and listen to others while participating in a methodical approach to decision-making.

Test writers sometimes complain they cannot perform to their true abilities because of time constraints. We therefore examined differences in terms of process and product between texts produced under test and non-test conditions. Ten L2 postgraduates wrote two argumentative essays, one under test conditions, with only forty minutes being allowed and without recourse to resources, and one under non-test conditions, with unlimited time as well as access to the Internet. Keystroke logging, screen capture software, and stimulated recall protocols were used, participants explaining and commenting on their writing processes. Sixteen writing process types were identified. Higher proportions of the processes of translation and surface revision were recorded in the test situation, while meaningful revision and evaluation were both higher in the non-test situation. There was a statistically significant difference between time allocation for different processes at different stages. Experienced teachers awarded the non-test texts a mean score of almost one point (0.8) higher. A correlational analysis examining the relationship between writing process and product quality showed that while the distribution of writing processes can have an impact on text quality in the test situation, it had no effect on the product in the non-test situation.

Welcome to the second issue of the Journal of Response to Writing! We are delighted with the warm response to this new journal and to our first issue, of which we are very proud. Thanks again to the authors who shared their work with us and to our Editorial Advisory Board.

Research has shown that in order to facilitate the development of students’ writing, teachers need to cultivate principles of effective feedback. However, revision is a joint process, and for the maximum effectiveness of this process, there should be more than just a giver-receiver relationship with the teacher giving the information and the student receiving it. Instead, students should be actively involved in the revision process by reflecting on and analyzing their own writing and meaningfully responding to teacher feedback. This teaching article describes a technique—Letter to the Reviewer—that facilitates collaboration between the teacher and the student. A Letter to the Reviewer is a memo that students attach to each draft, in which they provide a short reflective note to their reviewer by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of their draft and ask for specific feedback on certain elements of the draft. The technique was implemented in two first-year composition classes for multilingual writers in a large university in the Midwest. Teacher observations of student work and students’ self-reports on this technique demonstrated that the letters helped students approach their own writing more analytically, ask the teacher and peers for focused feedback, engage in the collaborative revision process, provide more specific feedback on their classmates’ writing, prepare for writing conferences, and recognize the connection between classroom instruction and their own writing.

In an effort to rethink the evaluation of student writing with the ultimate goal of convincing novice writers that rewriting predicates as well as presupposes the act of writing, I describe a point-accrual grading system where students accumulate points with redrafted submissions during a semester. This approach to evaluation offers students more autonomy in controlling their “earned” grade as well as incentivizes their investments in the revision process. In contrast to the normative percentages approach to grading, this point-accrual system not only gives students a less ambivalent form of grading but also moves them past surface-level revision and into rhetorical restructuring.