Writing is a critical proficiency for academic and career success, but a significant number of students enter higher education underprepared for the academic writing expectations awaiting them. Due to immense sociocultural barriers, linguistically-diverse college (LDC) students, in particular, may find college writing challenging. Complicated…

The development of preservice teacher beliefs is a complicated, non-linear process. It has been suggested that preservice teacher beliefs are highly impacted by their past histories as students, and that these beliefs act as a filter for interpreting the coursework and ideas in their teacher education programs. Understanding the way preservice…

Research in the area of academic writing has demonstrated that writing varies significantly across disciplines and among genres within disciplines. Two important approaches to studying diversity in disciplinary academic writing have been the genre-based approach and the corpus-based approach. Genre studies have considered the situatedness of…

As a way of examining how writing helps college students balance an understanding of subject matter with self and social understanding as well as develop their abilities to participate in the public realm, this qualitative study focused on the writing experiences of five college students, with particular attention paid to the assignments that…

Recent scholarship in rhetoric and composition has come to identify the English teaching assistant preparation seminar as a polemic site. In general, the seminar exists for the purpose of preparing graduate students to teach first-year composition. The fuel igniting this research lies with the teaching assistants and their educators who have…

The purpose of this grounded theory study was to explore Native American students' experiences with writing in the first year of college at a public research university and two tribal colleges, exploring in particular what helped them succeed as writers. Individual interviews with students served as the main sources of data and included…

This dissertation reports on a study investigating the identity of first-year university students as writers. The longitudinal project explored how students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds construct their identities as undergraduates and as academic writers in their first year. The research was qualitative and interpretative, and used…

The language shortcuts used in text messages are becoming evident in students' academic writing assignments. This qualitative study sought to determine if the use of the shortcuts has an adverse impact on developmental students' spelling and grammar skills. This research was based on the constructivist theory, which rationalizes that students use…

Science classrooms in the United States have become more diverse with respect to the variety of languages spoken by students. This qualitative study used ethnographic methods to investigate the discourse and practices of two ninth grade science classrooms. Approximately 44% of students included in the study were designated as English learners. The…