Teachers of young writers often feel pressure to focus on narrow, tested conventions, forms and processes of writing. These pressures can contribute to instruction that does not consider students' interests, experiences, language or cultures, but rather can further deficit views of students whose backgrounds do not closely align with those making…

Making connections between children's existing means of expression (play, art, and movement) and the intricacies of print is a necessary and time-honored approach to writing instruction in the early years of school, yet, after kindergarten, one that is easily overlooked. In this article, we examine an approach to writing instruction for…

Effective professional development (PD) in teaching writing involves supporting teachers' knowledge of the writer's craft, including their thinking processes, linguistic knowledge and practical strategies for teaching these. Grammar-for-writing approaches support teachers' knowledge of how grammar creates meaningful effects in writing. While…

This article reports on findings from the first year of a professional learning partnership aimed at supporting elementary teachers in improving their writing instruction for emergent bilingual students. Specifically, we present a case study of one fourth grade teacher's writing instruction, exploring how an introduction to a functional approach…

Preschool children hold immense writing potential that is rarely realized in traditional classrooms. This mixed-methods, quasi-experimental study focused on how best to teach these emergent writers. By comparing the effects of interactive writing, writing workshop, and traditional instruction, the study provided a clearer picture of how these…

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…

The creative writing workshop, involving peer critique of manuscripts in progress, is deeply connected to many writerly habits of mind. As such, this article examines workshop as a signature pedagogy in creative writing. Through workshop, students develop awareness of their readers, understanding of how texts are created by readers and through…

Despite calls to action, writing pedagogy in the English classroom remains outdated, and caustic partisanship among theorists may be to blame. The author proposes a "principled approach" to the teaching of writing, combining the best elements of verified instructional methods to generate six components ensuring student growth.

This study explored the relationship between legibility in handwriting scores and compositional scores of students in grade five in one Northwest Georgia school. The ability to recall and write the letters automatically may impact the composing skills of students engaged in the writing process. Handwriting, often considered a motor skill in young…

This article proposes ways to authentically amplify writer's workshop for emergent bilinguals. Through the study of one bilingual teacher's mediation in teaching, we examined the affordances that translanguaging and transmodal practices have for emergent bilingual students' writing processes. In this case study, we focused on a writing sequence…

Conferencing gives teachers and students opportunities to discuss student writing and provide feedback in individual settings. Practitioner guides offer suggestions on how conferences can be conducted, but little is known about what types of interactions occur. Two case studies, including a cross-case analysis, were conducted to describe key…

This article details how English classrooms might be reconceptualized as content creation sites where digital video (DV) composing enhances workshop approaches to English instruction. The author draws from a year-long study of a technology-rich twelfth-grade English classroom designed as a DV workshop at a diverse first-ring suburban school…

Iyengar and Hood, both teacher consultants with the San Antonio Writing Project (SAWP), and instructors of an undergraduate society and social issues class, collaborated to enhance their undergraduate students' writing experiences using the National Writing Project model (Lieberman & Wood, 2003). Iyengar and Hood used strategies such as…

Despite extensive attention to peer review in composition studies literature, the activity remains challenging to design, in part because there are multiple potential goals for peer review. This article draws on existing literature to describe a variety of peer review goals and then presents interview data to illustrate the perceptions of…

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,…