The countries that make up the Middle East have intersecting though distinct and internally complex historical, economic, and linguistic histories. Disparate colonial histories and postcolonial legacies, the religious and socio-political positioning of Arabic as a regional language, and the influences of globalization and translanguaging create…

Writing conferences are rich pedagogical settings to explore explanations. In contrast to teachers, writing consultants are usually peer tutors, straddling the roles of instructor and fellow student (North, 1984). This creates a unique situation where consultant-writer dyads must interactionally manage questions of expertise and authority (Carino,…

By reviewing the evolution of contrastive rhetoric, and the development of ESL writing teaching, this thesis presents the close relationship between the two and the positive influence of contrastive rhetoric on the teaching of ESL writing. This thesis also explores the new directions of contrastive rhetoric studies from two aspects: expansion and…

This article presents a case study of a fourth-grade teacher, Kathy Topaz (all names are pseudonyms), her seventeen students, and the ways that they talked about and rehearsed essay-writing through speech across the school year in an inclusive fourth grade class. With increased focus on informational writing and opinion writing in curriculum and…

The authors of this essay discuss the impact of corpus collection and analysis on the writing program at The City College of New York, CUNY, the digital literacies encouraged by the corpus collection process, and how corpus studies can be used to support genre awareness and build communities of practice in basic writing classrooms and among…

Genre analysis (GA) studies aim at creating a relationship between the text features and their underlying objectives, systematically built upon a series of moves. Highly motivated by the need to improve graduate students' skills in writing research articles (RAs) and adopting Swales' (1990) Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion (IMRD) framework;…

Most teachers participate in professional development of some kind at some point in their careers, yet many teachers report that professional development neither supports their practice nor improves learning. Thus, more work needs to be done on how professional development can meet those needs. In this study, a group of educators created a…

Teachers of writing have two options available to them when it comes to teaching paragraphing. There are, broadly speaking, either "laissez faire" approaches, or tightly prescriptivist ones. While the latter approaches have, at times, been challenged, they are entrenched in textbooks and testing rubrics, and are highly influential in…