Problems in developing writing often comes from creative processes in developing ideas to write. Outlines are often recommended as a tool to help students organize their thoughts and structure their writing. This study aims to find out students' perceptions and the challenges the students encountered when writing an exposition text using provided…

To challenge resistance to required literature courses, instructors quiz students regularly on the readings; they also require examinations that ask students to define key terms, to answer background questions focused on authors and dates, to identify key passages by author/title/speaker, and to explain the thematic significance of each quotation.…

Using a sequential explanatory mixed methods design, this study was designed to acquire quantitative and qualitative data that expose community college student perceptions on multimodal compositions compared to traditional writing practices. As traditional writing continues to be privileged in college writing classrooms, a critical pedagogy…

The Writing Program (WP) at Saint Louis University has striven to create a course that draws on a richer disciplinary understanding of writing and rhetoric. The standard course structure, from which instructors are asked to fashion their own syllabi, asks students to pursue a scaffolded semester-long project. As they pursue the scaffolded…

In this article, the author discusses composition studies by examining how incorporating "songwriting" into a first-year writing course enables students to begin expressing their own ideas/perspectives, while also developing the ability to create the concise, detailed texts associated with academic writing. The discussion offers a…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore recent research (2007-2017) on the implementation of multimodal writing instruction in secondary English courses. It seeks to highlight the varied ways in which theoretical conceptions of multimodality have been implemented in writing instruction and the impacts of these implementations on students' experiences…

How can secondary English teachers assign and teach argumentative writing to foreground its significance for students and their life trajectories? This article compares three approaches -- formalist, structured process and conversational entry -- in the light of this aim. Through analysis of exemplar assignments, the comparison illustrates the…

The author shows how using art helped a blind student in an AP class and students in Creative and Practical Writing classes improve writing proficiency and critical thinking.

This article argues that writing teachers should allow, and even encourage, students to code-mesh in community college classrooms. By looking at and analyzing code-meshed writing produced by three students in an English 101 class, the author argues that code-meshing provides students with both a craft-wise approach to writing and a way to address…

Tinkering is a longstanding material practice that has gained popularity in recent years as a learning strategy at numerous schools, camps, and makerspaces. This article seeks to establish in composition pedagogy tinkering's playful, exploratory ethos by introducing a practice called "critical-creative tinkering." In critical-creative…

Genre has emerged as a central concept in writing studies, with numerous scholars advocating for its prominent role in writing instruction. Despite this interest in genre, however, research has not explored teachers' understanding of the concept, which is critical to how they address genre in their classrooms. This study traces the evolving…

Providing written commentary on essays to students in English has long been a challenge for instructors. With increasing numbers of students being placed in classrooms, it can be difficult to deliver an adequate amount of feedback without taxing too much of teachers' time. Consequently, the author wanted to know what feedback students valued most…

This article explores the learning experiences of two students in the same college-level English course at Urban Serving Community College (USCC) (pseudonym). The objective was to understand how one student met with success and the other failure despite both successfully completing their developmental English course the semester prior. I observed…

This article examines the influence of context on student writing and discusses how the author used one methodology, problem-based learning, to foster more contextualized writing practice in ninth-grade English classes. Both research and practical experience suggest that students can benefit from writing practice contextualized within specific,…

The author, who teaches the English Methods class in the credential program, knew from entries in students' Writer's Reader's Notebooks (Rief) that they were struggling with the articles assigned about a five-paragraph essay. Following a discussion of form-first instruction and CCSS assessments, this article provides concrete suggestions for…