This profile describes how the Writing Program at Southern Utah University enacts a rhetorical humanist framework in its administrative and curricular structures. At the administrative level, rhetorical humanism offers a collaborative governance model that gives all faculty a voice in programmatic decisions, while managing the cacophony created by…

Because students learn from each other as well as lecturers, it is important to create opportunities for collaboration in writing classes. Teachers now benefit from access to plagiarism detectors that can also provide feedback. This exploratory study considers the role of four review types, open and anonymous, involving the students themselves,…

Teaching in higher education encompasses more than merely helping students develop knowledge and skills. It entails engaging students in their own formation as persons, professionals and citizens. From this perspective, this article investigates how approaches to teaching academic writing contribute to formation. By analysing a case from initial…

This qualitative research study examines how 12 undergraduate second-language learners understood the concept of citations in academic writing. The following questions guided this study: What are the participants' beliefs about citing research? How do students conceive the role and function of citations in their writing assignments? How do they…

This qualitative study offers critical insight into how language policy interacts with daily classroom decisions at a large and highly diverse urban community college in the United States. Specifically, it examines the challenges that faculty teaching developmental writing courses for English language learners experience when determining what…

This article analyzes the genre of the sourced comic as an important pedagogical tool in the development of both alphabetic and multimodal literacies. We argue that sourced comics provide multiple design elements with which students can explore their complex relationships with scholarly sources, make visible various power relations informing…

Published in a 2008 issue of "Journal of Basic Writing" ("JBW"), "Journalism, Poetry, Stand-Up Comedy, and Academic Writing: Mapping the Interplay of Curricular and Extracurricular Literate Activities" was Kevin Roozen's first single-authored publication. Drawn from data collected for the first case study from…

This article makes a case for using creative writing in a second language course. Creative writing increases students' enthusiasm for writing skills development and supports students' creativity, which is a fundamental aspect of education. In order to engage less motivated students, a series of creative writing assignments was implemented in a…

The paper reports the findings of a project that assessed the benefits of peer feedback as a formative assessment intervention for postgraduate international learners in the United Kingdom. The aim was to improve participants' understanding of quality in academic writing, and hence improve the summative assessment scores, by improving the quantity…

In this paper, we report on the development and implementation of a web-based mobile application, "Grammar Clinic," for an ESL writing class. Drawing on insights from the interactionist approach to Second Language Acquisition (SLA), the Noticing Hypothesis, and mobile-assisted language learning (MALL), "Grammar Clinic" was…

Throughout the last two decades, scholarship discussing learner development and autonomy has expanded from viewing the learner as one who possesses intrinsic or extrinsic motivation to a performer who to varying degrees invests as an agent in the learning process, particularly when able to pursue her or his passions. With this expansion in mind,…

Some teaching strategies grow out of the curricula educators inherit or develop through professional reading; others originate in the aromatic humus of their autobiographies. This article presents a proposal that has its origins in the latter. The author recognized that what delights her in prose or poetry is the figurative language a writer uses…

If you want to learn how to shoot a basketball, you begin by carefully observing someone who knows how to shoot a basketball. If you want to be a writer, you begin by carefully observing the work of accomplished writers. Recognizing the importance that modeling plays in the learning process, high school English teacher Kelly Gallagher shares how…

This article shares strategies that educators can use to assist students in meeting the challenges of academic writing more effectively. In order to foreground an understanding of struggling writers, the text begins with a brief review of composition theory and history related to basic writers and identity. It goes on to examine classroom…

Academic writing, individual or collaborative, is an essential skill for today's graduates. Unfortunately, managing writing activities and providing feedback to students is very labor intensive and academics often opt out of including such learning experiences in their teaching. We describe the architecture for a new collaborative writing support…