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,…

For Vygotsky, language is a cultural-psychological concept emerged from social interactions and is applied for higher cognitive functions such as thinking, meaning making, and knowledge construction. In this study, a sociocultural perspective was applied to analyze the language produced by 40 sophomore Iranian EFL learners during dialogic…

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…

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)

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)

Shows how one first-grade teacher explicitly modeled her own authorship processes and how students took up those processes in their own writing. Analyzes classroom discourse to illustrate how the teacher and students shifted roles in the participation framework of writing activity among teacher, author, co-author, and overhearer to facilitate the…

This study examined the teaching and learning of writing for secondary school students as it occurred in the interactive context of teacher-student writing conferences in the form of private teacher-student conversations about the students' writing or writing process. Following ethnographic procedures, the study examined naturally occurring…

This study of editorial conferences in a university news laboratory examined the connections between dialogues about revision and the interpretations of dialogues by reporters and the editor in this journalism culture. The editorial conferences of two reporters with varying experience in publication and employment settings were analyzed, and the…

It is viable to argue that literacy can be construed as a set of culturally-based discursive practices rather than as merely a set of cognitive skills. This idea has special relevance for students with learning disabilities, who often struggle with more traditional, individually-based curricular approaches. This study explored the ways in which an…

As part of a larger study of teacher-student conferences, a study examined naturally occurring one-to-one writing conference conversations between a ninth-grade English teacher (recommended as an excellent writing teacher) and three markedly different students. The study examined students' grapplings with the structure as well as the content of…

A study examined student-teacher writing conferences in a ninth grade English class to uncover what significance this form of instruction has both as a collaborative methodology and as a factor in individualizing the process of learning to write in the secondary school. Subjects included a successful ninth grade English teacher at a public high…

A case study examined the brief conversations about writing that took place between a high school English teacher and two of his students. One illustrative writing conference conversation lasting 1 minute and 19 seconds shows how, through the push and pull of their short exchange, student and teacher simultaneously read the book, read the writing…

When writing is taught through conferences between a student and teacher, the authority of the teacher profoundly influences what students think and say about writing. Also, as students learn to deal with their teacher's authority, they develop strategies for talking about writing tasks in voices that are authentically their own. An examination of…

This article examines writing conference discourse in one English as a Second Language (ESL) basic composition course. The study is based on a 25,000-word corpus of 10 writing conference interactions between the instructor and seven students. Through a microlevel analysis, the authors demonstrate how and to what degree the writing conference can…

A study of the dialogue journal writing of six sixth grade students of English as a Second Language (ESL) examines the interaction with the teacher. The subjects had been in the United States for less than a year, and came from Korean, Vietnamese/Chinese, Burmese, and Italian language backgrounds. Data for the study were drawn from the students'…