Stance is a growing focus of academic writing research and an important aspect of writing development in higher education. Research on student writing to date has explored stance across different levels, language backgrounds, and disciplines, but has rarely focused on stance features across genres. This article explores stance marker use between…

Increased attention to genre in writing studies has brought a proliferation of new terms and concepts for capturing the complexity of writers' knowledge about genres, including genre knowledge, genre awareness, recontextualization, conditional knowledge, and metacognition. Definitions of these concepts have at times conflicted, and their…

Offers a new theory of explanatory discourse intended to guide analysis of and stimulate improvement in explanations designed for the mass audience. Identifies research literature relevant to improving the quality of written explanations, organizes findings on effectiveness that resolve controversies in the literature, and suggests principles for…

Compares the performance of students who cooperated on an instruction writing task with that of students who worked alone. Concludes that cooperating dyads can improve the communicative quality of their instruction writing. (FL)

Indicates a significant difference between trained and nontrained teachers for four instructional practices and for the amount of interaction with other professionals. Shows that the effects of training on students endured for three years for the treatment group at the junior high level. (JD)

Evaluates the reader-protocol method of teaching writers to anticipate readers' comprehension needs. Involves asking writers to predict readers' problems with a text and providing them with reader responses. Finds that writers taught with the reader-protocol method improved more than writers in control classes, and increased in their ability to…

Explains why structured composition assignments produce better writing than nondirectional writing experiences, explores the reasons for this, and establishes hypotheses based on these reasons for developing a theory of composition instruction. (HOD)

Concludes that structure of topic makes a difference in writing quality, fluency, and total error but not in any error ratio. Suggests that, for placement testing, educators should first decide which types of students they wish to identify, because each topic structure distinguishes low, average, and high ability students differently. Topic…

Examines how teachers adapt writing instruction to a microcomputer classroom. Calls attention to time pressures, issues in training students in word processing and revising, ways a microcomputer classroom can foster workshop approaches, the need for carefully structured classroom activities, and the importance of teachers and students sharing…

Discusses the work of Donald Graves, who has achieved wide recognition for propounding a method of teaching writing that stresses unstructured expression of personal experiences, using a case study of 16 children as his research base. Concludes that because Graves never considers negative evidence for his hypotheses, his work constitutes reportage…