This discussion article presents practices for designing more supportive and individualized writing tasks for adolescent and young adult students. The practices emerged from a synthesis of findings from a prior study in which we asked 79 undergraduates to talk about moments from their writing histories that made them feel proud of their writing.

In this article, the authors share an account of an eighth-grade personal narrative unit designed to support students in composing accounts of life during the 2020-21 pandemic school year. The article provides an overview of the four phases that comprised this nine-lesson unit and the materials and resources used. Students' voices, perspectives,…

Writing can improve children's speaking, boost their reading comprehension, build their knowledge, and elevate their thinking. However a reason it may be hard to learn is that without explicit writing instruction, children often write the way they speak. From elementary through high school, many children answer questions with little elaboration.…

This paper reports on research undertaken in two fully online, asynchronous university courses. Representing two masters' programs, one led to a degree in reading as a reading specialist, and the other, to a degree in special education as an educational diagnostician. This investigation explored how writing conferences helped graduate students to…

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 book explains seven critical steps to improve children's writing. Though seemingly 'natural', writing proves devilishly difficult for far too many school pupils and closing this gap can have a lasting impact on their academic and life success. With the goal of giving every teacher the knowledge and skill to teach writing with confidence, it…

Even in online and distance formats, multimodal composition can be a means of sustaining culture and engaging children. The Teach Us project combines multimodal composition, family cultural resources, and student voice.

In most academic writing programs worldwide, instruction aims to develop students' awareness of essay types, written language use, and test-taking strategies. However, teachers' instructional practice is often dictated by their knowledge base, perception, and the intuitions they have about language use (Borg, 2006). Such intuitions are not always…

Writing is the result of our desire to express our feelings, thoughts, dreams, and ourselves. In today's education, with the penetration of technology into our lives, what we express not only on paper but also on the screen is within the scope of writing skills. Writing is a language skill that requires high-level mental skills such as producing a…

Transnational youth use digital media to affiliate with diverse cultural and linguistic practices, as demonstrated through the use of multiple languages and hybrid linguistic codes, media genres and multimodal expressions in the youths' online communication and writing (Black, 2009; Domingo, 2014; Kim, 2016). This study introduces a learning…

The researchers of this hermeneutic phenomenological study applied Colaizzi's (1978) method to analyze and interpret English Language Arts (ELA) teacher candidates' (TC) learning experiences with literacy quadrants and narratives while attending secondary writing instruction methods courses in diverse institutional settings. Qualitative strategies…

A substantial body of research has demonstrated the efficacy of early writing interventions that target skills and composing processes; however, much less is known about the effectiveness of classroom writing instruction outside of the context of an intervention. The goal of this study was to investigate if writing instruction and student practice…

Writing is complex, and the more researchers understand the cognitive processes and engagement for writing, the more complex the relationships between cognition and producing writing appear. Writing theory is constantly shifting from a focus on mechanics and form to a focus on creativity and sociability. This literature review analyzes four…

Underprepared students often need assistance building writing skills and maintaining confidence in their abilities and potential. The authors share the philosophy, pedagogy, and experience of freshman developmental education and the writing center at a four-year, private, not-for-profit urban college. They describe high-impact educational…

For almost 40 years, the Minute Paper has been a quick and easy means of learning assessment, both in the college classroom and in library instruction. More recently, the use of social media, particularly selfies, has gained popularity by connecting with students through the technology with which they are most familiar. This article makes the case…