This chapter will describe the evolution of a study of graduate education students' needs as writers. Recognizing that many of my students--who would soon be teaching children to write--struggled with various aspects of writing, I began a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) study to examine (a) my students' perceptions of…

Struck by his students' often hostile and apathetic responses to assignments and instruction and hoping to contribute to the knowledge of motivation, Dan LaSalle began to take an inquiry stance on his own practice. He studied his practice on three fronts with the help of an off-site teacher research group: (1) how his inquiry question changes as a…

Youths' learner-generated designs, instantiated in digital practices, spaces and artifacts, are underutilized in schools. Additionally, digital media tools are often taken up in reductive ways that serve to perpetuate deficit discourses for youth from nondominant communities, rather than reflect the creativity and innovation that youth practice…

Against the backdrop of proliferating research on multimodality in the fields of literacy and writing studies, this article considers the contributions of two prominent theoretical perspectives--Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Situated Literacies--and the methodological tensions they raise for the study of multimodality. To delineate…

The "Teaching Academic Content and Literacy to English Learners in Elementary and Middle School" practice guide was developed by the What Works Clearinghouse™ (WWC) in conjunction with an expert panel to support teachers in providing language instruction. The practice guide provides teachers with guidelines and examples of ways to…

The following dissertation explores how higher education faculty members' memories of learning content and learning to write influence their pedagogical practices and examines how disciplinary and departmental contexts intersect with those pedagogical practices. The research was designed as a nested case study that draws on interview data,…

A team of secondary school language teachers and a teacher trainer developed a new method for Dutch writing instruction. The principles underlying the method were derived from insights regarding activating instruction and self-directed student learning. The development entailed two phases. In the first phase, the exploration of actual problems in…

Considers how when two-year college students take time to write at length, paying more attention to their own feelings and those of their readers through regular response and revision, they write better. Presents four assignments that all students would attempt, then share with classmates, and with partners at the other grade level via a Web site.…

Produced as part of a collaborative research project in which classroom teachers teamed with university-based research assistants to explore questions raised by the teachers in the course of their work with students, this monograph deals with the issue of "occasion." Following a review of theory and research about aspects of occasion…

Cites results of studies showing that students' language skills are not deteriorating. Suggests using class time for writing workshops to give students feedback on work-in-progress. Considers that difficulty with concepts and subject content may come across as poor writing. Notes that additional writing can be helpful without being graded. (DK)

In an effort for schools to obtain Adequate Yearly Progress, the pressure is on to make certain that students are loaded with as much information as possible in order to score well on the high stakes tests. Writing has continued to move down the list of priorities of what is taught because: it is not being tested or is minimally being assessed.…

The product of a course at the University of Pittsburgh, this book offers educators the opportunity to see how the acts of reading, writing, and thinking that characterize work in academia appear to those students who lack adequate preparation for such work--namely, basic writers. The introduction to the book presents an overview of the course and…