This dissertation will broaden the purview of recent scholarship pertaining to socially just writing assessments by making connections among assemblage theory and materialism, studies of ecological and anti-racist assessments, and studies of writing center work, to ground theoretical conversations in everyday practices. Focusing on systemic…

The purpose of this paper is to study the development of Theory of Mind capacities in one individual's narrative writing from year 1 in elementary school through high school and onwards. To this end this longitudinal study focuses on evaluative expressions while drawing on the Appraisal theoretical frame work, developed by Martin (2000) and Martin…

Feedback has typically been studied as a means of improving academic performance. Few studies inquire into the processes by which feedback shapes student identity. The authors carry out a discourse analysis of written comments to explore how feedback is discursively constructed by both teachers and students. Analysis of written feedback,…

We present a new approach to investigating student reasoning while writing: real-time capture of the dynamics of the writing process. Key-capture or video software is used to record the entire writing episode, including all pauses, deletions, insertions, and revisions. A succinct shorthand, "S notation," is used to highlight significant…

A study examined how college students wrote a critique of a sociology article; which features of written critiques were valued most by professors in the discipline; and whether students' educational level and status predicted the quality of their critiques. Subjects, 32 students enrolled in an upper-level sociology course, read and responded by…

It is argued that assessment of student writing can be enhanced by adoption of a functional approach to linguistic analysis; through their research, functional grammarians have provided language teachers with criteria for evaluating the extent to which learners have gained control of the grammatical and discourse features of a variety of…

This paper presents case studies of four students' experiences with writing in a fourth/fifth grade classroom. The paper focuses on the following questions: What is the relationship between children's social and intellectual identities and their successes or struggles in writing? How do writing instruction and assessments mediate that…

Focusing on purpose in the writing of college freshmen, a study examined the writing processes and how they related to the conceptions of purpose of four freshmen enrolled in a composition course at Indiana University. Discourse-based interviews were conducted before and after the students completed three tasks designed to vary their choice of…

Essays on research and teaching of academic writing in English as a second language include:"When Practice Doesn't Make Perfect: The Case of a Graduate ESL Student" (Melanie Schneider, Naomi K. Fujishima); "Good Writing: I Know It When I See It" (Ilona Leki); "Redefining the Task: An Ethnographic Examination of Writing and Response in Graduate…