Writer identity has gradually become a focus in writing scholarship in recent years. From a social constructivist lens, writer identity is not optional; it resides in all texts. And it is a construct that does not exist in a vacuum, but is shaped by the sociocultural and academic context, and simultaneously individual writers agentively select…

Many scholars have investigated metadiscourse use in academic settings, but they have mostly explored written data, such as academic essays and research articles. However, spoken discourses like student presentations are rarely explored. Extant studies tend to focus on metadiscourse investigation in either native or non-native English learners'…

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…

We, as multilingual teacher-scholars, had lingering questions about what community programs were doing, operating outside of school contexts, to maintain the bilingualism of racialized, Latinx children in Philadelphia and to resist the monolingual ideologies circulating in US society. To answer those questions, we partnered with a bilingual,…

This study examines how instructional conversations revealed the ways two teachers' argumentative epistemologies (ideational and social process) shaped literacy events focused on the warranting of evidence. A microethnographic study of the literacy events within each teacher's respective instructional unit revealed that each teacher's epistemology…

Entering the world of academic writing can be a troublesome experience for young researchers, especially for those writing in ESL. In addition to mastering the specific language of their disciplinary community, they also have to adopt an array of metadiscourse features which help them organize their writing and position themselves towards their…

This paper comprises findings from three parallel case studies within the broad framework of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). These provide results from classroom-based action research conducted over two years working with Semantics, Specialisation and axiological cosmologies from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). Each author shares how one or…

Student voice is a difficult concept to capture in research. This study attempts to provide a vehicle for understanding student perceptions about writing and writing instruction through a case study supported by discourse analysis of student talk. The high school students in this study participated in interviews and focus groups about their…

This ethnographic case study explores intercultural and ethnographic engagement by undergraduate Hong Kong students enrolled in an Intercultural Communication course at a public research university. Ethnographic projects originated from virtual exchanges with undergraduates in a professional writing course at a private research institution on the…

The purpose of this paper is to explore a subset of findings taken from yearlong qualitative study of writing conferences in two diversely populated, urban high school classrooms. Drawing on multiple data sources, we used case study and discourse analytic methods to follow two focal students across the year in order to examine instructional and…

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…

Background: The teaching of writing in English First Additional Language (EFAL) classrooms remains less explored in the Further Education and Training Phase (FET) in South Africa. This is so despite research showing a decline in the writing skills of second language learners, especially at the FET phase, calling attention to how writing is taught.…

The teacher-student writing conference has long been recognized as being able to provide personalized instruction and contribute to learners' writing development. However, teachers often find it time-consuming to conference with individual students on a regular basis. Conferencing with pairs of students, therefore, may become a more pragmatic…

The teaching and learning of writing in the elementary classroom setting is a complex process. As students participate in the classroom community and write, they engage not only in the cognitive task of academic writing, but in various social practices as well-negotiating positionality, developing identities, cultivating understandings of genre,…

Graduate writing is receiving increasing attention, particularly in contexts of diverse student bodies and widening access to universities. In many of these contexts, writing is seen as "a problem" in need of fixing. Often, the problem and the solution are perceived as being solely located in notions of deficit in individuals and not in…