In an effort to teach law students to “think like a lawyer” and develop their professional identities, attention has turned to helping students self-regulate their learning. To encourage self-regulated learning among her first-year law students, one of us (Tanner) adapted a self-regulated learning prompt developed by the other (Roderick) to assign The Legal Writing Manual—a capstone project in her first-year legal writing course, which tasks students with instructing others in processes and practices for composing legal memoranda and appellate briefs. Each student’s manual is built upon previous analytical and self-reflective work carried out in a first-year legal writing course. The experience of articulating instructions for legal writing encourages students to self-regulate their learning by re-thinking knowledge and practices for legal writing.

Research on writing and transfer has shown that writers who have sophisticated rhetorical knowledge are well equipped to adapt to new situations, yet less attention has been paid to how a writer’s adaptability is influenced by their writing processes. Drawing on Zimmerman’s sociocognitive theory of self-regulation, this study compared the writing processes taken up by graduate student writers composing a research proposal for their final project in a tutor-training practicum. Findings from process logs, interviews, and drafts differentiated self-regulation strategies associated with varying degrees of success. The more successful writers framed problems in terms of potential solutions, used problems to set goals, and reacted to problems by creating a narrative of progress; in contrast, less successful writers avoided problems or framed them as dead-ends. Compared to the less successful writers, the more successful writers concluded the project with robust knowledge about research proposal writing. These findings suggest that self-regulation strategies may be linked to an ability to develop rhetorical knowledge and practices in the face of challenging writing situations.

This study investigates how literacy was constructed at an adult literacy organization’s volunteer tutor-training program. By drawing on qualitative analysis of training texts used during training, such as training evaluations, and data gathered from interviews with experienced tutors, it is possible to identify the assumptions about literacy constructed by the training program and tutors’ training practices. Tutors seemed to present mixed assumptions about literacy: students simultaneously were given authority over their own literacy practices and literacy goals, while a sentiment of universally valued reading and writing skills was also present in terms of achieving fluency.