Learning to write is a complex process and children have to orchestrate a range of processes and skills in order to produce written messages. Young children are facing increasing demands in terms of the expected complexity of their written messages in education settings across the world. Teachers, in turn, are challenged to support children and…

Emergent bilingual students in the U.S. often attend English-medium schools where their bilingual language resources are ignored and dismissed. Research suggests this is harmful for students, but little empirical work has examined how teachers in English-dominant schools can support students' biliteracy. To address this problem, this qualitative…

First-grader students engaged in a guided historical inquiry about Abraham Lincoln. The teacher carefully intertwined historical content, close reading, critical thinking, and text-based writing during Reading, Writing, and Social Studies classes. Students scrutinized secondary sources, which were largely biographies of Lincoln, to build their…

Narrative has begun to take its place alongside the essay, for so long the stereotypical currency of the history teacher and student. In this work, based on his experiences as a PGCE student, Alex Rodker argues powerfully that it is time now to consider how to help students to produce not just narratives, but better narratives. He builds on the…

Despite calls to action, writing pedagogy in the English classroom remains outdated, and caustic partisanship among theorists may be to blame. The author proposes a "principled approach" to the teaching of writing, combining the best elements of verified instructional methods to generate six components ensuring student growth.

This book is the first to bring together a collection of recent empirical studies investigating languaging, an important construct first introduced by Swain in 2006 but which has since been deployed in a growing number of L2 studies. The contributing authors include both established and emerging authors from around the globe. They report on…

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…

Sarah Irwin and Cyndi Knodle believe that by replacing the confines of content and form in writing instruction and assignments with ample "time and space for invention and arrangement, writing teachers can help to inspire student thinking rather than chopping it off to fit a required format." They elaborate on students' eagerness to be guided by a…

Identifies, categorizes, and explains four types of classroom communication (alchemistic/prewriting, analytic, evaluative, and closure talk) that improve student writing. (RL)

Details, in a personal narrative, some techniques which have proved effective for enabling student success in the basic writing classroom. (PA)

Content or subject matter, interpersonal relationships, and symbolic means of representing meaning are interacting elements that affect language use. The elements have been described as the field, tenor, and mode of discourse. The influence of these concepts on what children write, why they write, and for whom they write are explored. (DF)

Examines how the relationship between teacher and student alters the connection between the writer's authority and the quality of the reader's attention. Discusses how teachers assess student writing from the perspective of an "ideal text," at the expense of discerning what the student is actually trying to say. (HTH)

Describes the importance of annotation to reading and writing practices and reviews new technologies that complicate the ways annotation can be used to support and enhance traditional reading, writing, and collaboration processes. Emphasizes issues and methods that will be productive for enhancing theories of workplace and classroom communication…

Examines how students in a bilingual third-grade classroom coconstruct knowledge through oral and written discourse. Explains that, by analyzing the various interactional patterns of the class, the multiple opportunities for learning become visible. Demonstrates how a group of students achieved the common task of writing a "planet story." (PA)

Explores ways teachers can intervene in the writing process to help students advance in their writing. (JL)