This activity offers students a way to engage in cover letter writing, familiarizing themselves with the style and content of these documents in a creative, fictional scenario. Students will both prepare letters and evaluate them, with options to vary the gamification of the activity included. During the debrief, students assess their experience…

This study investigates teacher participation in a national online youth civic letter writing project through the lens of teacher civic commitments. Drawing on in-depth interviews and survey data from teachers who participated in the Letters to the Next President 2.0 project, civic commitments are articulated through civic beliefs, learning goals,…

This article introduces an assignment that will help instructors effectively teach media grammar and convergence to their students. Hybrid letter writing (HBL) is an experiential learning assignment where students learn about media grammar and convergence by experiencing it. The current modus operandi of teaching convergence and media grammar is…

Teaching workplace communication is vitally important as we expect public servants to have the skills to draft, review, and revise written communication materials. Less explicitly demanded, and more often implicitly expected, we assume public servants know how to respond to individuals with empathy while also meeting technical obligations, such as…

Abstract concepts, such as gravity, may provide the perfect opportunity to bring phenomena into the classroom. As a knowledge generation strategy, summarizing can foster that opportunity. Using phenomena and summary writing together might help student learning since it requires making connections between their ideas and words to explain the…

This ethnographically-oriented, multi-year study examined an epistolary writing relationship between third grade students and the teacher's uncle, known to them as Uncle Billy, who, at the time of the study, was corresponding from prison. Taking place within a Reformed Christian school, this study encapsulates the pedagogy of Ms. Thompson, the…

First-year composition courses must balance a range of writing instruction priorities including genre and audience awareness with language instruction, particularly for second-language writers. Despite the attested efficacy of "dynamic" written corrective feedback for language gains in intensive English programs, little research has…

Anxiety can affect learners' performance in several ways. It can be a helpful motivational tool to assist students in learning a language. At the same time, anxiety can become a serious factor in hindering language acquisition. This study examines the relationship between students' writing performance and anxiety levels across three different…

Özge Yol is a former composition instructor and ESL/EFL teacher. Currently a doctoral candidate in the Educational Theory and Practice program at Binghamton University, she describes a "write a letter to your friend" activity she designed using peer-feedback to facilitate student engagement through the use of guiding questions. The task…

This exploratory research presents the implementation and evaluation of the effects of integrating corpus consultation with business English writing instruction. The subjects consisted of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners enrolled in two undergraduate business English writing classes. Two groups of EFL students were randomly assigned,…

This article reports on how pen pals can be incorporated into the literacy classroom for engagement and motivational interest. The authors describe a study in which focused, interactive pen pals were implemented in a third-grade classroom, and the influence this practice had on students' writing. Incorporating pen pals during writing instruction…

How can social change become possible when secondary teachers approach argument as participation in ongoing conversations? The authors illustrate how--through writing, speaking, and reading to develop a letter to their principal arguing for a school policy change--secondary students participated in multiple conversational spheres across time and…

The community college continues to deal with the challenging of educating developmental writers. The challenge becomes more daunting with the failure of many to see this as a social and political endeavor. This article delves into the need to teach developmental writing in a way that empowers writers to see themselves as authors and their lives as…

Among the language skills, writing has been considered as the most difficult skill not only for native speakers, but for foreign language learners as well in the sense that one cannot achieve fluency and accuracy unless they become successful language users in terms of listening, speaking, and reading. This action research studied the effect of…

Writing alongside 12 African American Muslim girls, we led a summer literacy program in an effort to understand how Black Muslim adolescent girls write about their identities and ideas. The 4-week literacy program was designed to engage and support Black Muslim girls, aged 12-17 years old, in reading, writing, and understanding the multiple…