The employment of genre-based pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching in second language education is representative of a paradigmatic shift towards a focus on meaning-making. Despite this shift, second language acquisition (SLA) research continues to predominantly rely on complexity, accuracy, and fluency metrics to assess learner production…

This article discusses the dialogic nature of regulating perspectives on a controversial topic during students' argumentative writing in remote teaching. The emerging collaborative writing processes mediated by digital technology are importantly changed as responses to physical distancing in education, as demanded by the measures of biosecurity…

Drawing on conversation analysis (CA), this study examines reported thought (e.g., "you're like 'do I really have to do that?'") and its function in writing center talk. Previous related studies, which are informed by Goffman's (1981) notion of footing, have demonstrated how reported thought (RT) is a resource for modeling undesirable…

Drawing on the framework of Modality from systemic functional linguistics, the present study aimed to explore adolescent ESL learners' interpersonal meaning-making. Data were collected from 10 writing tasks completed by a group of 50 adolescent ESL learners in China. Functional text analysis was utilized to analyze the data, including Modality…

Academic writing is not a lifeless communicative endeavor. It is an interactive process where both writers and readers negotiate meanings in many complex ways. In the case of persuasive essays, students should venture to manifest stance and identity rather than just write to transport ideas. This paper looked into this important aspect of academic…

Background/Context: School districts are increasingly expected to support students in meeting ambitious mathematical learning goals. Many schools and districts are investing significant resources in the provision of time for teacher collaboration in the hope that this will help teachers improve their instruction in ways that support students in…

As new communication technologies enter the classroom, teachers must attend to how digital platforms impact the interpersonal practices of teaching and learning. In this article, I study email exchanges with three of my students--Jorge, Adriana, and Jason--over the course of one year in an 11th-grade English class at River High School, a…

This empirical case study aims to identify how graduate student women mentor each other when tutoring writing and, through doing so, assert their right to belong in the academy. Much existing literature on feminist mentoring emphasizes the need for better mentoring for women, whether in work or school environments, in current or future faculty…

This ethnographic study examines the role of spirituality in the composition teaching process and in Paolo Freire's dialogic education specifically. Work to acquire some aspects of spiritual "Discourse," as the term is defined by James Gee, is needed in order to make this spiritual foundation visible and practicable. Through a series of…

This study compared the frequency, structure, and purposes of laughter in writing tutorials between 46 acquainted and unacquainted tutor-student pairs. Of particular interest were instances of shared, or coordinated laughter, which took the form of sequenced, simultaneous, and extended laughter. Familiarity, viewed as a continuum, was also…

Web 2.0 applications such as YouTube have made it likely that students participate in online back-and-forth exchanges that influence their rhetorical literacy. Because of the back-and-forth nature of online communities, we turn to the procedural, critical, and progressive qualities of dialectic as a means of accounting for what makes public…

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)

A study investigated whether student non-comprehension strategy use would vary according to learning environment by looking at the tutoring session--a more intimate learning situation than the classroom. Through collection and analysis of five tape-recorded tutoring sessions, results indicated that the eight undergraduate students were more likely…

Demonstrates how auditors use negative politeness strategies to meet the complex demands of potentially threatening interactional situations. Substantiates the claim that politeness is a linguistic universal by showing that the same politeness strategies found in speech also occur in written communication. (MS)

The discourse of writing center conferences was studied to determine whether it is potentially different from classroom discourse. The question was what happens to communication between teacher and student when the setting and roles are somewhat altered. The writing center setting was chosen because the focus is on face-to-face conversation that…