Teachers' instructional practices surrounding written assignments have been little researched, despite writing remaining the primary means of assessment in higher education, including postgraduate professional development programmes. In this paper, we report a study that explored what a sample of lecturers in a Master of Education programme at an…

This study is an examination of the outcomes of practicing autoethnography, specifically in the context of first-year undergraduate, writing-intensive courses. The researcher recounts his initial, inspiring encounter with autoethnography and explores the possibility of its pedagogical application in composition instruction. Autoethnography is a…

Focusing on writing instruction within an era of international curricular reform, this study analysed classroom observations, educator interviews, and documents related to Japanese elementary writing instruction. A deductive approach using discourses of writing framework and an inductive approach to Japanese cultural practices uncovered beliefs…

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…

Writing retreats are structured events during which a group of people write in the same room over several days. In this paper, we report on findings from a study exploring the impact of writing retreats on PhD students' writing and their sense of self as academic writers. A second aim of the study was to contribute to the search for appropriate…

In this article, we detail our findings from a case study of three instructors as they newly implemented service-learning pedagogies into their first year writing classes. Drawing on the instructors' perspectives as part of a larger programmatic assessment, we demonstrate that a service-learning curriculum can broadly foster learning outcomes for…

This study analyses the practices of nine New Zealand teachers of upper primary and middle-school students (N = 210) whose classes had consistently shown gains in writing far greater than normative expectations. Data from observations of three writing lessons and related interviews with each teacher, plus interviews with three focus students after…

This study examines how instructional conversations revealed the ways two teachers' argumentative epistemologies (ideational and social process) shaped literacy events focused on the warranting of evidence. A microethnographic study of the literacy events within each teacher's respective instructional unit revealed that each teacher's epistemology…

A professional development (PD) program for Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI) integrating effective PD features was implemented with teachers over 3 years. Using a 1-way analysis of variance, it was examined whether length of participation in PD impacted knowledge and ability to faithfully implement. Findings indicate…

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…

How to prepare teachers to be effective in our nations' classrooms seems to get increasingly complex, yet the links between teacher education and teachers' eventual practices are little understood. Using complexity theory as a theoretical framework, this mixed-methods study investigated writing teacher practices of 23 elementary teachers. Twelve…

An account is presented of how schools in Hong Kong have responded to major changes to the official writing curriculum, from the highly structured, whole-class approach which predominantly involved all students in the class painstakingly learning written script and modeling their writing on carefully chosen examples of traditional writing, to an…

This paper explores the effects participation as writers has on the identities teachers take on when they are both writers who teach and teachers who write. This paper focuses on three interview participants and explores their encounters as writers as they engaged in the "risky" business of being writers, within and beyond school. A…

Effective feedback is an essential tool for making learning explicit and an essential feature of classroom practice that promotes learner autonomy. Yet, it remains a pressing challenge for teachers to scaffold the active involvement of students as critical, reflective and autonomous learners who use feedback constructively. This paper seeks to…

Writing Studies has flourished as a field in Latin America during the last two decades. Its development has been fostered by an exponential growth of college enrollments and processes of expansion and democratization of the educational offer in the region. The renewed attention received by higher education writing has fueled new research efforts…