This discussion introduces a heuristic to guide writing instruction with adolescents and young adults. Our framework, called "Open World Writing," consists of six writing territories (vision, material, design, voice, flow, polish) that provide focus and clarity for writing and educators working across academic and creative writing…

Instructors at postsecondary institutions have designed a myriad of data science classes to keep up with the rise of big data. Businesses and companies have become increasingly interested in hiring people with strong data acquisition, management, and communication skills. Since data science as a field of study is relatively new, though it has deep…

This study reports on student writing outcomes from a two-year interdisciplinary collaboration between applied linguists (the authors) and an organizational behavior (OB) professor. We used an ethnographic language-focused approach to make explicit the linguistic features of the case analysis genre at an American university in the Middle East. We…

In science disciplines, students need sufficient and well-designed support to successfully gain writing competence along the different stages of their writing development. This study examines effective inquiry-based writing pedagogies and the contextualization of scientific writing instruction for supporting student writers in the scientific…

In this Teaching Issues contribution, six instructional strategies to address culture in second language (L2) writing are discussed. These strategies have been conceptualized as a set of heuristics to enhance student awareness about various cultural and linguistic resources in L2 writing. Each teaching strategy is based on challenges that student…

Whereas composition studies tends to use ethics and morality interchangeably, these terms may work better when explicitly distinguished, rearticulated as a topic, and kept in heuristic conflict. The more the tension between them is exploited, the closer our approach to a pedagogy not so much ethical as just.

This article explores the ways in which the language of the hero's journey can serve as a heuristic for teachers at all stages of their professional experience. Teachers in Canada and the United States were interviewed via Skype about their experiences around writing and literacy. Four teachers are profiled here, two from Canada and two from the…

Community service education (CSE) in developing countries still remains under-represented in research. Addressing this gap, this article reports a study that investigated a CSE activity at a secondary school in Sri Lanka. The participants of this study comprised 10 English as a second language (ESL) teachers from four secondary schools, 68 Grade…

This program profile describes a restructure of the PhD exam intended to enhance graduate-level instruction and advisement within the Rhetoric and Composition program at Georgia State University. We explain how a mix of institutional constraints and mentorship opportunities drove revisions to our doctoral exams and processes of doctoral…

Researchers in the field of composition studies have spent a great deal of time, energy, and scholarship proposing and debating strategies for collaborative pedagogy. While these discussions can be generative, many overlook what should have been central all along: the student collaborators. With this in mind, this essay seeks to focus our…

This paper reports on qualitative research from an Australian, K-6, faith-based school about teachers' experience of a job-embedded professional learning initiative (the "Whole-School Benchmarking of Writing," WSBoW) that was designed to improve teachers' capacity to apply data-driven decision-making to achieve improvements in student…

First-year writing courses at Catholic colleges and universities can provide students the communicative tools to intellectually engage with Catholic doctrines and beliefs in the public sphere. However, writing programs can neglect to balance grammar, logic, and rhetoric. This article provides a practical Catholic first-year writing course design…

Writing-to-Learn in High-School Chemistry: The Effects of Using the Science Writing Heuristic to Increase Scientific Literacy The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) as an instructional tool to improve academic achievement and writing in the context of scientific literacy. This…

National discussions about source-based, academic writing in higher education have been and are increasingly tied to concerns about citation proficiency, plagiarism, and academic integrity. In response to these discussions, scholars have argued for better pedagogical strategies to teach students how to work with sources in effective and ethical…

The issue of voice has received considerable critical attention in second language writing (SLW) in the past decades. This study intends to enrich the research of voice in the Chinese context, which may mirror some issues in EFL environments. The short story writing process of an English-major undergraduate was particularly analyzed in this study,…