Writing and genre scholarship has become increasingly attuned to how various nontextual features of written genres contribute to the kinds of social actions that the genres perform and to the activities that they mediate. Even though scholars have proposed different ways to account for nontextual features of genres, such attempts often remain…

What aspects of writing are doctoral students metacognitive about when they write research articles for publication? Contributing to the recent conversation about metacognition in genre pedagogy, this study adopts a qualitative approach to illustrate what students have in common, across disciplines and levels of expertise, and the dynamic…

Contemporary international migration produces a great deal of bureaucratic writing activity. This article reports on a study of one bureaucratic literacy practice--correspondence--of 25 international migrants in the United States. Contextual and practice-based analysis of data collected through literacy history interviews shows that (a) by virtue…

Scholars have recently begun to conceive of literacy practices as drawing from resources that are simultaneously situated and extracontextual. In particular, studies of transnational literacy affirm the importance of both locality and movement in literacy studies. Continuing this inquiry into the situated and dispersed nature of transnational…

We investigated changes across grades in the cognitive demands associated with the organizing subprocess of writing. A total of 85 fifth (age M = 10.8), 88 seventh (age M = 12.9), and 79 ninth (age M = 14.6) graders composed either a procedural text or an expository description on a digital tablet, on the basis of a "scrambled ideas"…

New media are having a significant impact on science communication, both on the way scientists communicate with peers and on the dissemination of science to the lay public. Science blogs, in particular, provide an open space for science communication, where a diverse audience (with different degrees of expertise) may have access to science…

Using Ivanic's (2004) framework, the study of 20 elementary teachers examines the relationships among teachers' beliefs about writing, their instructional practices, and contextual factors. While the district-adopted curriculum reflected specific discourses, teachers' beliefs and practices reflected a combination of discourses. The nature of the…

This article discusses challenges involved in contrastive discourse analysis that emerged while carrying out a follow-up study into a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) program in Spain. Reversing the focus on English of much contrastive rhetoric work, the study investigates the effect of second-language-English on…

This study reports about a yearlong study of the initiation of novice grant writers to the activity system of National Institutes of Health grant applications. It investigates the use of cognitive apprenticeship within writing classrooms and that of social apprenticeship in laboratories, programs, departments, and universities, which introduced…

This article critically explores the value of ethnography for enhancing context-sensitive approaches to the study of academic writing. Drawing on data from two longitudinal studies, student writing in the United Kingdom and professional academic writing in Hungary, Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal, the author illustrates the different contributions…

In "Dialogic Origin," Mikhail Bakhtin -- as teacher-researcher and theorist -- presents readers with a remarkable essay on teaching grammar and style to 7th-year students (roughly equivalent to 10th graders in the U.S. educational system). In doing so, Bakhtin employs some of his most notable concepts (among them dialogism and "hero") as informing…

This article presents evidence that, from selected spectroscopic articles in the earliest volumes of the Physical Review to other selected spectroscopic articles from the same journal in 1980, a shift in sentence style takes place. This shift is from what M.A.K. Halliday calls the dynamic style (which reflects happenings, processes, and actions)…

This is an extended summary of a pedagogic essay by Mikhail M. Bakhtin on writing style, titled "Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar: Stylistics as Part of Russian Language Instruction in Secondary School." In this essay, written in spring 1945 while Bakhtin was a secondary school teacher of Russian language arts, he argues that every…

Examines two passages from Thucydides'"History of the Peloponnesian War" to illustrate the origins of scientific writing and to explore the relationship between scientific writing and epideictic rhetoric. Concludes that Thucydides' work merits an important position in the history of scientific and technical writing. (JAD)

The three authors writing on Bakhtins essay, "Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar" -- Farmer, Halasek, and Williams -- respond to one another, and Bazerman provides a summative comment in the paragraphs that follow. The responses explore further some of Bakhtins thoughts concerning rhetoric and its relation to stylistics and his use…