Trickster tales, with their teachings on how to behave in the world, are a powerful means for transmitting social knowledge and cultural mores to children. In this study we compared two approaches to teaching fourth-grade students to write trickster tales. Although both instructional methods incorporated aspects of the writing process approach,…

Draws on a longitudinal study of urban adolescents' literacy practices. Argues for a focus on students' writing practices both in and out of school to develop a comprehensive understanding of their capacities in the classroom. Suggests the importance of looking outside the physical space of schools and beyond the time that students are in…

Shows how one first-grade teacher explicitly modeled her own authorship processes and how students took up those processes in their own writing. Analyzes classroom discourse to illustrate how the teacher and students shifted roles in the participation framework of writing activity among teacher, author, co-author, and overhearer to facilitate the…

In literacy and composition studies, efforts to develop data-driven theories of disciplinary writing expertise and of writers' developmental processes in joining specific discourse communities have so far been limited. This case study, of one writer's experiences as an undergraduate history major, parses the multiple knowledge domains comprising…

Richard F. Thompson and Michael G. Southwell separately discuss William J. McCleary's article on reliability and validity problems in composition research (see EJ 210 755); Chris Madigan questions the data on composing processes of freshman writers reported by Sharon Pianko (see EJ 204 419); and C. T. Patrick Diamond examines the issue of the…