This case study closely examines how John (a former student of mine, age eight, second grade) composed during an informal writing group at school. Using qualitative research methods, I found that John selectively took up conventions, characters, story grammars, themes, and motifs from video games, television, Web pages, and comics. Likening his…

Examines the teaching and learning of writing for secondary school students as it occurs in the interactive context of teacher-student writing conferences. Finds that collaboration is a shifting process shaped by conference participants and by the rhetorical circumstances of their talk. Describes collaboration as a continuum, varying both across…

Summarizes a study of five unskilled college writers, focusing especially on one of the five, and discusses the findings in light of current pedagogical practice and research design. (DD)

While recent studies have demonstrated the importance of material structures in shaping writers' roles and practices in academic settings, relatively little attention has been focused on temporality, which exists as an embedded aspect of all such structures. Using the perspectives on temporality articulated in Anthony Giddens' concept of…

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…

Examines how school writing tasks (notetaking, answering study questions, and essay writing) interact with three measures of learning (recall, concept application, and gain in passage-specific knowledge). (HOD)

Describes the revision strategies of basic and competent twelfth-grade writers as they wrote for their teachers and their peers. (HOD)

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…