Standards of academic writing are documented in style guides adopted by academic disciplines, style guides such as the "Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association and Scientific Style and Format." Some of the standards in these style guides are expressed as prescriptive or proscriptive rules that provide academic…

The highly diverse character of US universities provides an opportunity for writing programs to (re)examine the extent to which their current administrative, curricular, and pedagogical practices support a growing student population with unique linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds, resources, and needs. This dissertation research…

This study is about student writers' development of their own approaches to using formulaic phrases from a compendium (Academic Phrasebank). While the essential role of formulaic phrases in academic texts has been well established in research, teaching about the effective use of these phrases is not widely available, and little attention has been…

This study addresses to see the significant difference between those who were taught using Jigsaw 1 model and those who were taught using picture composition to enhance the students' ability in writing descriptive writing. This cooperative study involved two groups. Sample of this research were the students of X-A using Jigsaw 1 Model and X-B…

The purpose of this article is to describe the development of writing in young dual language learners, who are children under 5 years old who are learning the dominant language and another language at the same time. Early writing has been associated with literacy outcomes in the later years of elementary school. The article presents samples of…

In this Retrospective I revisit Donald Murray's "A Writer Teaches Writing," fifty years old this year, and argue for a reconsideration of Murray's legacy within composition and rhetoric by claiming that the frame with which scholars and teachers of writing have tended to understand Murray (i.e. Donald Murray = Expressivist) is limiting…

How can teachers boost motivation and interest in writing when a student has disengaged from writing? This article looks at the case of a student with sensory and social challenges who lost interest in writing. Possible reasons for the loss of interest are explored through the elements that contribute to motivation for learning and for writing.…

The current study determined growth patterns during an 8-week writing intervention and then examined the association between growth pattern and students' initial skills as determined by instructional-level data. One hundred forty-seven first-grade students struggling with early literacy skills received a writing intervention at one of two tiers of…

For decades, researchers have investigated the impact of faculty-student interaction as well as the contexts in which such interactions occur and are most productive (Astin, 1993; Kuh & Hu, 2001). Cox (2011) identified two consistent outcomes from this body of research: first, that interactions between faculty members and students have…

The authors showcase the use of DocuViz, an information visualization tool, as a means to support middle school students' online synchronous collaborative writing. The purpose of this study was to explore writing outcomes when students write in groups and independently. Providing students with a tool to help them understand their individual…

The authors describe the Analytic Writing Continuum, a scoring system developed by writing assessment experts and the National Writing Project that provides a powerful way for teachers to assess students' writing and see good next steps for writing instruction. They give examples of educators using the AWC both to help students self-evaluate their…

This dissertation is a qualitative study of fifteen WPA instructors of the composition practicum. Driven by the primary research question, how do WPAs enact mentorship within composition practicum?, the study sought to better identify how WPAs enact and perceive mentorship within the composition practicum through an activity-theory framework in…

Children can become better communicators by expressing their thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Effective communication through speech or writing enables children to successfully convey their messages. When teaching writing to children, educators often look to writing traits--ideas, organization, word choice, voice, sentence fluency, conventions--to…

(Re)Entering data from a networked collaborative project exploring how sound operates as a mechanism for attuning towards cultural difference and community literacies, this article examines one primary grade classroom's participation to investigate the rhythmic rituals of 'emergent listening' in early childhood literacy. Thinking with sound…

This article describes a brief moment when the University of Kentucky (UK) became the national focus of conversations around food literacies for a writing class about tacos in the U.S. South. Author Steven Alvarez explains to "Munchies" writer Javier Cabral that taco literacy goes beyond an appreciation of tacos. Alvarez describes his…