In this article, we describe student-centered routines that prepare students for success on ambitious text-based writing assignments. Based on research showing the important role that peer collaboration and classroom discussion play in developing students' thinking, these routines support students to 'try out' their ideas, learn from the…

As recent scholarship emphasizes the value of social learning, this article describes a course redesign that sought to encourage such social learning. This multi-year course redesign includes altering a daily writing assignment to make it more specific and to make it a contribution to the learning of a study group. Data was collected and evaluated…

For Vygotsky, language is a cultural-psychological concept emerged from social interactions and is applied for higher cognitive functions such as thinking, meaning making, and knowledge construction. In this study, a sociocultural perspective was applied to analyze the language produced by 40 sophomore Iranian EFL learners during dialogic…

Mutuality practice in the composition classroom attempts to create equal subject positions between teachers and students, mitigating the effects of dominant power structures inherent to an authority-driven classroom while showing teachers that their students are fully capable, though fledgling, members of an academic community. Understanding how…

Today, many students not only access the Internet through desktop and laptop computers at home or at school but also have copious amounts of information at their fingertips via portable devices (e.g., iPods, iPads, netbooks, smartphones). While some teachers welcome the proliferation of portable technologies and easy wireless Internet access, and…

One composition instructor's purpose is to address, or perhaps, re-dress, the balance of the relationship between teacher and student using a dialogic framework that provides for reciprocity. Her aim is to provoke, to seduce (persuade through passion), and to awaken their incipient sense of wonder at the world and the language that creates this…

Students can be motivated to write and be guided through the writing process without giving them the impression that they are doing it again until they get it right. To motivate students, make it known as specifically as possible what kind of written assignment will be required and how it will be graded. Then guide the students towards the goal by…

Breaking down gender barriers in composition and literature classrooms suggests that teachers rethink the forms of writing they demand of their students (e.g., argumentation and exposition) and that they encourage a wide range of approaches which account for gender-specific modes of writing and interpreting texts. Various writing assignments such…

Focuses on the oral language that accompanies the writing process of Native American students. Finds that of all the oral language observed during composing, 90 percent of that language was related to the fact that writing was taking place. (MG)

Collaboration in writing is not confined to conventional multiple authorship and peer editing, but extends across the text to include its readers. Strong support for language development comes from dialogic situations in which student writing is created as a response to some other utterance, and yet classrooms rarely support such situations. The…