Organizing writing instruction around genres rather than rhetorical modes can be a highly effective and engaging preparation for students' academic and professional writing needs. The teaching/learning cycle (TLC) is a highly scaffolded curriculum model for teaching target written genres. In the TLC, the organization of and linguistic choices in a…

The authors describe a multimodal concept drawing activity designed to facilitate students' understanding of terms used within an assignment in a first-year college writing course. In this activity, students write ideas, read definitions, study images, and create multimodal representations of a term in groups of classroom peers. The activity…

Student success in higher education often involves the effective integration of source texts into students' writing (Horowitz, 1986); therefore, advanced second language (L2) students are particularly well served by effective reading-to-write instruction. Teaching L2 students to write from sources is challenging because of several issues,…

Teacher-student writing conferences are considered a valuable teaching method in composition courses, used mostly with the purpose of discussing students' progress in their writing. This article presents an exploratory study on student and instructor expectations and perceptions of writing conferences in a semester-long writing course for…

Four ideas for use in the English-as-Second-Language classroom are presented: (1) using the World Series to practice name recognition; (2) current events portfolios; (3) creating standards sheets for writing assignments; and (4) decreasing the likelihood of stragglers in class. (Author/VWL)