English 3374: Writing, Rhetoric, and Multimodal Authoring, an introduction to multimodal composition rooted in the subfield of computers & writing, thrives in the literary studies focused English BA undergraduate program at The University of Texas at Arlington. An underlying assumption of the course reflects a long-standing position in…

Orthographic knowledge is information about the writing system stored in memory that children draw upon to read and write. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the ways in which kindergarten teachers use verbal scaffolds to support children's development of orthographic knowledge during writing instruction. This case study of four…

This paper synthesises some of the recent studies that have made links between handwriting as an orthographic-motor strategy and the quality of pupils' learning and literacy skills. A poor standard of literacy is evident in many British school leavers and, in some cases, university graduates. The paper outlines the implication of this situation…

The science laboratory report, a staple of science instruction across all educational levels, can be syntactically and lexically challenging for both native and nonnative speakers of English. Because mastery of the science report genre in Western societies relies on internalized knowledge of the structure of the science report as well as on the…

The Writing in the Disciplines approach encourages writing instruction in specific majors so that students learn the writing conventions of their discipline. As writing instructors, however, the role of the sociologist is problematic. Not only has standard sociological writing been jargon laden, it has privileged a clinical style of writing. Thus,…

Writing has long been recognized as both an outcome and method of successful pedagogy in psychology. Accordingly, there are a number of methods that successful instructors have employed to teach psychology students how to write. One such method is to facilitate students' reviewing each other's written work (i.e., to engage in peer review),…

The first time of many significant encounters is the most intense, raising awkwardness, anxiety and hope. This article presents data from doctoral students (n = 80) who described the first time that they submitted writing to their supervisor and received feedback. The first writing/feedback exchange is an initiation into the cultures of academia.…

This paper reviews research on outcomes of writing programs for students in grades 2 to 12. Studies had to meet rigorous standards of research including use of randomized or well-matched control groups, measures independent of the program developers, researchers, and teachers, and adequate sample size and duration. Fourteen studies of 12 programs…

This article describes a teacher's willingness to perform an autobiographical spoken word poem in his classroom, which provided an important model for students as they composed and shared their own slam-style poems.

Teaching a senior seminar on creative nonfiction led author Sarah Gompers to consider how she might help her students understand the concept of writing with vulnerability. All stages of the writing process must be explicitly taught, and this extends to something as basic as topic selection. When students are taught about vulnerability--what it is,…

As in teaching other languages, the most difficult of the four basic skills in teaching Turkish as a foreign language is writing; it includes very different strategies from sequencing to analysis and synthesis. In addition, foreign language learners tend to transfer the forms and meanings of their own culture and language to the target language…

Self-regulated learning (SRL) is a fundamental skill to succeed in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), but many learners do not know how to self-regulate their learning. The need to support SRL in MOOCs led to the idea of social-psychological interventions that promise to improve course performance and decrease dropout rates. However, past…

This article focuses on the 2019 National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement (NMSSA) assessment of student ability in writing. It begins with an overview of the study and its results, then turns to students' use of planning strategies to support their writing. Drawing on research on the association between planning and achievement in writing,…

Reading and writing are fundamental skills students need to succeed in college, making literacy development an issue of education equity. The literacy skills can be content-specific, indicating faculty members across disciplines need to support student development of appropriate literacy skills. The extent to which faculty members support student…

This study proposed a set of measures for assessing noun phrase (NP) complexity in second language (L2) Chinese writing and compared the predictive power of these measures for L2 Chinese writing quality to that of a set of syntactic complexity measures based on the topic-comment unit (TC-unit). Our data consisted of 101 narratives written by…