"Mattering" is a key component of success for students (Rosenberg & McCullough, 1981). For community college students, the classroom plays a critical role in their college experience because community college students spend most of their time on campus (Lundberg, 2014). Among college courses, first-year writing classes hold…

In the English classroom, narrative writing is often separated from the work of reading literature or used merely to coax reluctant students into discussing textually relevant topics. This article discusses a close writing activity, Image Explosion, that engages students in narrative writing that brings attention to the smallest details of…

This study examines the beliefs and practices, specific to writing, of six preschool teachers using observations, interviews, photographs, and surveys. Gerde, Bingham, and Pendergast's (2015) WRITE [Writing Resources and Interactions in Teaching Environments] protocol was used during observations, allowing researchers to focus on each classroom's…

Reflection is a necessary component of learning. Through reflective assignments and tasks, students are given opportunities to evaluate their learning and analyze strategies they use while acquiring and applying course material. Reflections also help students assess and think deeply about the information presented in class and thus better retain…

When students write informational text, they have the opportunity to engage with meaningful topics, become curious about the world, learn domain-specific knowledge, and use academic vocabulary. Given the possibilities for learning through writing informational text, it is important for teachers to reflect on and improve their informational writing…

The quality of teacher-pupil interactions is important for pupils' learning and engagement, and teachers play an important role in facilitating learning. Tablets are often used in primary education. This study evaluated the quality of teacher-pupil interactions during first-grade lessons, with and without tablets, during a typical school day…

In this article, the author reflects on ways that their folklore-studies approach to the college writing classroom enables Virginia Commonwealth University's diverse student population, and especially historically marginalized groups, to create and appreciate cultural texts. Illustrated is how a "material culture" course theme can convey…

Past studies have indicated that teachers' self-disclosure has a direct influence on students' learning. It has impacted students' motivation, participation, interest, affect for teacher and course, solidarity, affinity seeking behaviours and out-of-classroom communication. However, little is understood about how this phenomenon affects teaching…

Epideictic rhetoric reifies and reshapes the shared values of a community, and in this article, I reread William E. Coles Jr.'s "The Plural I" as showing forth a classroom built upon epideictic rhetoric, his own epideictic pedagogy asking that teachers of writing engage student work not expecting to be persuaded but as observers of…

Boys' attitude to writing is widely perceived as an issue in English primary and secondary schools. Prior research has identified a link between negative attitudes to writing and lower achievement and raised the issue of the stereotyping of boys as underachievers in literacy. The study reported here suggests that if we are to understand the…

Using a qualitative case study design and applying a sociocultural theoretical perspective, support for self- and co-regulated learning in an elementary Spanish and English dual-language classroom was documented. The multi-age classroom comprised 33 students acquiring English and Spanish, at school (52% female students; 20 fourth grade and 13…

This article argues for understanding Kenneth Burke's linguistic pedagogy as a teaching practice rooted in the appreciation of disability. It explores connections between the Cold War cultural context and the present day, describing how a nuanced approach to disability pedagogy can resist impulses toward competition and conflict in the classroom…

Portfolio assessment (PA) is promulgated as a useful tool to promote learning through assessment. While the benefits of PA are well documented, there is a lack of empirical research on how students' self-regulation can be effectively fostered in writing classrooms, and how the use of PA can develop students' self-regulated capacities. This…

The current study aims at developing English major's EFL creative writing skills through using Ergonomics based instruction. Sixty two students were randomly divided into two groups: experimental (n=31) and control (n=31). The experimental group received ergonomics based instruction whereas the control group received regular instruction. An EFL…

Two professors at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock co-taught an interdisciplinary course in speaking and writing dialogically, that is, without lecture. Given that many learning environments include large enrollments and online instruction, both of which often foster an impersonal atmosphere, it seemed that dialogic instruction might…