Although authors often create literary texts in order to comment on issues of personhood and human relationships, reading and writing about literary texts in schools is often focused on close analysis of literary elements or exploration of one’s own experience with the text. Thus, students’ written arguments about literature typically do little work in the world toward understanding the human condition. In response, we argue for a theoretical and instructional framework of reading and writing about literature called Dialogic Literary Argumentation. Dialogic literary argumentation asks students and teachers to engage in reading, dialogue, and argumentative writing about how they and others make meaning out of literary texts, what the meaning says about what it means to be human together, and how we might act in and on the worlds in which we live. In this article, we explicate the various elements of this theoretical framework that situates the student’s literary argument within their own cognitive processes, social interactions in classroom events, and broader sociocultural contexts. Students’ composed arguments draw on multiple texts (the literary text, others in and beyond the classroom, their own experiences, the literary discipline, and the world), which are mediated by various classroom dialogues, scaffolds, and supports.

Although current research and professional development on teaching of argumentative writing focus on “best practices,” we offer the construct of argumentative epistemologies to consider how English language arts teachers approach teaching and how they understand their students’ capacity for and interest in argumentation. Drawing on historical emphases in writing theory, we describe and illustrate three argumentative epistemologies: structural, ideational, and social practice. In an observational study of 31 high school English language arts classrooms, teachers’ enacted writing instruction foregrounded either formal elements of students’ arguments, the ideas and content of students’ arguments, or consideration of the complexity and variability of social contexts within which students wrote arguments. Case study analysis of three teachers illustrates the three argumentative epistemologies, how these epistemologies were socially constructed during instructional conversations, and how they were made visible through language use in and about classroom literacy events. These argumentative epistemologies have significance for teacher education, school writing research, and professional development, furthering our understanding of how and why teachers choose to adopt particular approaches to argumentative writing.

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 four-year longitudinal study examines the transitions of an early-career teacher from her completion of a graduate program with English certification (grades 7-12) into teaching literature in an urban high school. Our central question was how Beth’s pedagogical knowledge was shaped over time by her consistent efforts to enact two key principles: (1) the centrality of students’ meaning making and (2) the need to maintain high academic expectation for all students. The tensions that resulted from her department’s stances toward these principles led to consequential transitions (Beach, 1999, 2003) for Beth’s learning and development. An activity-theoretical analysis showed that over time Beth’s development was shaped by the values, experiences, and practices of other teachers in her immediate professional communities and in contexts external to the department. Rather than relying on a single activity setting, Beth’s pedagogical knowledge and practices developed out of an interweaving of conceptual and practical tools based on the constructivist principles of her teacher education program, her deepening knowledge of English studies, her students’ learning, her enactment of new teaching practices, and her involvement in this longitudinal research project. This study raises questions regarding stage theories of teacher learning and development, suggests a horizontal notion of teacher development grounded in sociocultural theory, and provides evidence for the positive and lasting effects of teacher education and reflective practice.

This study describes some of the tensions and challenges that 9 student teachers faced as they attempted to apply theoretical tools or principles for teaching middle and secondary school English to the realities of practice. Several contexts or activity settings both shaped and complicated the appropriation process, including undergraduate experiences with and prior beliefs about English as a school subject, the preservice methods courses, field work prior to student teaching, and the classroom context for student teaching. To describe the socialization the student teachers experienced that mediated their appropriation of the principles of instructional scaffolding, we identified three modes of participation in teaching middle and secondary school English. For some, teaching included both the learning of classroom routines as well as reflective practice, that is, a theory-based consideration of instructional decisions; for some, teaching was a process of procedural display in that they were absorbed primarily in enacting lessons that worked for themselves and for their students, making it difficult for them to consider the principles underlying their instructional decisions; and for some, learning to teach was a matter of mastering routines, that is, adopting, without adaptation, curricular and instructional practices without concern for students’ understandings or for instructional principles espoused by the teacher education program. The data suggest that the alignment of various activity settings supported the appropriation of teaching tools and a reflective stance toward teaching and learning. On the other hand, when activity settings worked at cross-purposes with one another, they created obstacles for the appropriation of theoretical and practical tools emphasized at the university. This study suggests the importance of understanding the kinds of relationships that student teachers develop within each setting and how social settings get negotiated and identities get constructed as a result of personal history.

This study examined the effects of three study conditions (review only, study questions, and analytic essay writing) on high school students writing and learning from text (concept application, immediate recall, delayed recall, and recall of manipulated content). An experienced social studies teacher and two levels (general and academic) of her eleventh grade U.S. history course participated in the research. Observational and case study techniques were employed to describe the teacher’s pedagogy, and then a volunteer group of students from each class read, reviewed or wrote about their reading, and were tested on learning from selected history passages. Analyses of the students’ writings indicated their varying approaches to studying and writing about the passages. Both forms of writing enabled both groups to perform better on all learning measures, with the academic students consistently outperforming the general students. Analytic writing was associated with higher scores on concept application, while study questions led to better general recall in the immediate and delayed conditions. When recall was further analyzed for the number of content units contained in the written responses to the two writing tasks, more content units appeared in the analytic writing in both the immediatea nd delayedc onditions. Although the general students’ performanceso n this posttest measure were not as strong as the academic students’ performances, they benefited more from analytic writing than from answering study questions about the history passages. Because both instructional context and academic ability seem to influence students’ performances on writing-to-learn tasks, the study suggests the need for research that will disentangle these influences to identify the effects of pedagogy and student ability on learning from writing.

Although studies of writing and literary understanding have demonstrated the value of analytic essay writing for enhancing story understanding, these studies have focused on student's initial interpretations without considering the effects of a teacher's support and direction. The purpose of this study was to explore how 9th- (n = 6) and 11th- (n = 6) grade students reformulated and extended their initial written analyses of two short stories through revisions fostered by two different kinds of between-draft written comments. After revising initial drafts in two response modes (directive and dialogue), the students wrote paragraph-length responses to posttest questions of story understanding. Results indicated significant (p < .05) main effects for response condition and grade level, with the dialogue condition enhancing story understanding more than the directive condition, and the 11th graders attaining higher posttest scores than the 9th graders. Data from composing-aloud protocols revealed that the dialogue condition supported the students' reformulation of their own interpretations constructed in the initial drafts, while the directive condition seemed to shift the students away from their own initial interpretations of the stories.

While writing researchers and theorists have claimed that composing fosters learning, we need a more rigorous conceptualization of the effects of various writing tasks on learning. This study attempted to refine and extend present knowledge of the interrelationship of writing and learning by examining the effects of various writing tasks (notetaking, answering study questions, and essay writing) on learning using recall of specific text elements and recall of the theme or gist of expository writing. The results indicate that the relationship of writing and learning is indeed complex, and that factors such as students' topic-knowledge prior to writing, the content structure of the passage, and the nature of the task all assert some influence on what students learn from expository text.

Recent research suggests that if we overlook topic knowledge we may ignore an important source of students' writing problems. Given that writers' topic knowledge affects how and what they compose, this article presents a systematic strategy for examining topic-related knowledge prior to writing. Included in the discussion is a theory-based rationale for the measure, a formalized method for analyzing topic knowledge, and a guide for using the instrument.