Drawing on surveys and interviews with college writing instructors and students at a public university in the United States, this mixed methods study revealed that in many cases instructors adopted translingual orientations, whereas students were committed to norms in their views of writing across differences. Students' orientations to language as…

This paper explores the diasporic tellings of Black African refugee-background youth through a critical Ubuntu literacy framework. The five tenets of a critical Ubuntu literacy state that participants are (a) already participating in community; (b) reflecting on oneself in relation with others; (c) seeing themselves in relation to community; (d)…

African immigrants in the US and across the globe are confronted with issues of language and culture retention, resistance to the loss of the same, and reconstruction of their identities while navigating the sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts of the host nations. The experiences of one such family are shared through the African Oral…

This paper presents a study designed from a socially situated and activity theory perspective aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of how Ph.D. students regulate their academic writing activity. Writing regulation is a complex activity of a highly situated and social nature, involving cyclical thought-action-emotion dynamics and the…

The purpose of the present study is to examine concurrent and predictive evidence used in the validation of ACCUPLACER, a purchased test used to place first-year students into writing courses at an urban, public research university devoted to science and technology education. Concurrent evidence was determined by correlations between ACCUPLACER…

In this article, we show how two transnational youth, with the instructional support of their teacher, recruited their languages and lifeworlds, particularly their border-crossing experiences, as tools for engaging with school-based literacy practices. We analyze literary texts that the students composed, showing how the students' uses of their…

Composition theorists concerned with students' academic writing ability have long questioned the application of voice as a standard for writing competence, and second language compositionists have suggested that English language learners may be disadvantaged by the practice of emphasizing voice in the evaluation of student writing. Despite these…

In order to prepare effective writing teachers, teacher educators need an understanding of how preservice preparation programs, inservice professional development, and the policies and practices of K-12 schools work together to influence teachers' writing instruction. This qualitative case study uses complexity theory (Davis & Sumara, 2006) to…

"Research in the Teaching of English" (RTE) is the flagship research journal of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in the United States. It is a broad-based, multidisciplinary journal composed of original research articles and short scholarly essays on a wide range of topics significant to those concerned with the…

The ethics and efficacy of explicitly teaching disciplinary discourse conventions to undergraduate students has been hotly debated. This quasi-experimental study seeks to contribute to these debates by focusing on the conventional special "topoi" of literary analysis--conventions that previous Writing in the Disciplines (WID) research indicates…

This study explored how voice developed in the English writing of 57 Chinese teachers of English who participated in a three-week writing workshop during a summer institute in a large, urban school district in southeastern China. Teachers from grades three through twelve wrote daily in English in a workshop environment. Primary data sources were…

Teachers who have participated in Summer Institutes of the National Writing Project (NWP) have often claimed "it changed my life." What do teachers mean when they say this? What does it mean to "transform" in a professional development setting, and what might researchers and professional development providers gain from an…

This study examines discussions of model papers in a high school Advanced Placement English classroom where students were preparing for a high-stakes writing assessment. Much of the current research on talk about writing in various contexts such as classroom discourse, teacher-student writing conferences, and peer tutoring has emphasized the…

While academic discourse communities have been extensively studied as social contexts of forms/functions, and teachers, lessons, and students have been researched from every imaginable angle, the prevailing view of academic writing conventions is still quite normative. The conventions of the academy are often regarded as a stable collection of…

Examines the efficacy of main idea clues in four English composition texts, logging main idea statements, tallying main idea clues, and comparing results with those of a similar study of sociology texts. Concludes that main idea statements exist and are pointed to by clues as frequently in English composition texts as in sociology textbooks. (JG)