This article reports on research addressing the role of incident reporting at the workplace as a textual representation of lean management techniques. It draws on text and discourse analysis as well as on ethnographic data, including interviews, recorded interaction, and observations, from two projects on workplace literacy in Sweden: a study in…

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,…

In spite of views that children's writing development is in large part a linguistic complex process involved in their engagement within and across social activities in and out of school, the literature is scant on the wide range of semiotic resources that children may draw on to animate their poetry writing and performances. Drawing from a case…

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…

Voice in mobile texts has received attention lately among scholars in literacy, sociolinguistics, and rhetoric. Some sociolinguists of globalisation have argued that uptake is shaped by the norms of each literacy regime. Though texts of non-western communities will gain positive uptake in local literacy regimes according to their own norms and…

Drawing on a case study of newswriting, this article presents media linguistics as a subdiscipline of applied linguistics (AL), dealing with a distinctive field of language use. Language in the media is characterized by specific environments, functions, and structures. Medialinguistic research, however, tends to overcome disciplinary boundaries.…

This article reports on a qualitative case study that explored the literacy and disciplinary experiences of 4 Taiwanese/Chinese students learning to write in a US graduate TESOL program. A combination of writing research methods was employed--case study techniques of interview and document collection, combined with discourse and text analysis of…

Important to issues of writing instruction are the ways in which teachers, specifically those who teach in the discipline of language arts and English, understand and see themselves as writers. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how secondary English teachers positioned themselves and were positioned by others as writers through…

Explores one-to-one communication in teacher-student conferences in a college-level technical writing course. Examines whether the need to access their different knowledge bases would foster substantive conversational exchanges between instructor and student. (RAE)

Discoursal construction is illustrated with 1 case (a 26-year old's academic essay) and then discussed in terms of Goffman's framework of self-representation through any form of social action. It is suggested that Critical Language Awareness, unlike other teaching/writing approaches, focuses explicitly on the discoursal construction of writer…

Presents a case study of one first-grade student's literacy behavior while corresponding through email during a 13-month period. Presents guidelines for teachers for developing an email pen-pal project. Suggests email is a powerful new medium for writing. (NH)

Much has been written about the transformative influence of new technology on the school curriculum, but only a small number of studies have focused on the practical implications for primary literacy. The dominant paradigm seems less concerned with transformation, instead favouring a view of "technology as enrichment". This case study…

When students write syntheses in response to a rhetorical task, does the rhetorical nature of the task exert some special influence on the students' composing processes? How do these processes differ? Three case studies, quantitative analyses of papers written by seventeen undergraduates, and a tentative model of a synthesizing process address…

Discusses what a spontaneously formed group of three children thought and did as they composed a story together. The observations focus on the whole writing process. (HTH)

Offers a case study of a "prewriting" class discussion and student writing in a secondary English class in an inner-city school. Suggests that, more than establishing a relationship with readers, students' talk and writing invoke a complex of roles that reflect their relationships with one another, the outside world, and their texts. (SR)