Although writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) programs have been commonplace since the 1970s, the focus has largely been on the level of assessment and programmatic development and less on the instructors, particularly graduate teaching assistants (TAs), who adopt these practices. In this article, we describe a pilot WAC graduate-level course in…

Literacy scholars have called for writing instruction to promote civic engagement, student agency, and multimodal composing. This study addressed this call by describing a research-practice partnership to reimagine writing instruction in a high school English course by incorporating human-centered design challenges. Using case study methods, we…

This study described the features of writing instruction in widely used kindergarten English Language Arts programs and examined their alignment with evidence-based, best-practice guidelines. Three popular curricula were selected for analyses: Reading Wonders, Journeys, and Reading Street. Our coding of teacher manuals focused on instructional…

There is an assumption that English teachers identify as writers. This article explores the stories of three secondary preservice English teachers, their descriptions of their writing experiences and their self-perceived vulnerabilities around writing. These narratives originated in a broader research study into the writer identities of preservice…

In this conceptual paper, borne from the experiences of two academic literacy lecturers at the NWU, we ask, regarding elements of assessment, how we can sensibly adapt an intervention-style writing course in a post-COVID higher education context. We propose a course correction model, applicable to academic literacy writing courses, to address the…

Interdisciplinary collaborations to help students compose for discipline-specific contexts draw on multiple expertise. Science, technology, education, and mathematics (STEM) programs particularly rely on their writing colleagues because (1) their academic expertise is often not writing and (2) teaching writing often necessitates a redesigning of…

This paper discusses the development and implementation of a locally-sourced corpus to address the specific needs of an ESL writing program. The paper begins with a description of the motivation and development of the "Corpus of Ohio Learner and Teacher English" (COLTE), a large in-house corpus consisting of assessed ESL student writing…

Purpose: This paper aims to recommend that English educators engage preservice teachers (PSTs) in thinking and acting agentively in twenty-first century writing instruction by prompting them to examine and (re)construct discourses around identity, beliefs and teaching contexts. It explores metacognitive interventions that supported one PST to…

This qualitative research study sought to understand the affordances and limitations of a systemic functional linguistics (SFL) approach to teaching composition at the community college level. The study took place over the course of a semester in two developmental college composition classes using the language of SFL to teach writing through…

The current assessment in language classrooms prevailingly utilizes the criteria provided by instructors, regarding learners as passive recipients of assessment. The current study drew upon sustainable assessment and the community of practice to highlight the importance of involving learners in co-constructing the assessment criteria and argued…

There is a consensus nowadays that the best way to develop students' academic literacy abilities is within the context of their studies in the disciplines, an approach known as 'curriculum embedding'. But despite the demonstrable value of this approach, surveys of the field in Australia suggest there has been only limited success over the years in…

The purpose of this study was twofold. First, it aimed to determine whether the application of backward design model has any significant effect on improving the writing ability of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. Second, the study sought to evaluate the superiority of backward design to conventional forward models in the improvement of the…

Purpose: This paper aims to examine how a collaborative narrative inquiry focused on cultivating critical English Language Arts (ELA) pedagogies supported teacher agency, or "the capacity of actors to critically shape their own responsiveness to problematic situations" (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998, p. 971). Design/methodology/approach:…

Neuroscience offers insight into how we learn. Understanding how to leverage neural development pathways is of interest in teaching because the circuits in the brain respond to effective pedagogical practice; therefore, the role of the teacher is critical. Neuroscientific studies (Damasio in The feeling of what happens: body, emotion and the…

There are significant apertures between the history told within historians' scholarship and teachers' curricular resources. The Civil Rights Movement (hereafter, CRM) of the 1950s and 1960s did not start with Rosa Parks' arrest in Montgomery, though it was a spark that inflamed a long-smoldering fire. Nor did it end with Dr. King's dream in…