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…

Whereas composition studies tends to use ethics and morality interchangeably, these terms may work better when explicitly distinguished, rearticulated as a topic, and kept in heuristic conflict. The more the tension between them is exploited, the closer our approach to a pedagogy not so much ethical as just.

Purpose: Recently, practitioner literature in English education has taken up the issue of writing-related shame in classrooms, calling for teachers to help students develop resilience. One possible approach for nurturing shame resilience around writing is dialogic collaging: students make and dialogically engage with collages and with colleagues…

Learning management systems (LMSs) are ubiquitous components of the academic technology experience for learners across a wide variety of instructional contexts. Learners' interactions within an LMS are often contingent upon how instructors architect a module, course, or program of study. Patterns related to these learner interactions, often…

In recent years corpus linguistics research findings have begun to trickle down into some student language learning texts, both in terms of the focus and the specific material taught. However, when it comes to writing pedagogy, the materials, templates and the models presented to students tend to show a remarkably conservative (and uniform)…

In 2016, with mounting pressure from parents, educators, and other stakeholders around the state pushing back against the volume of standardized tests students are required to take, the Texas Education Agency introduced the Texas Writing Pilot. This pilot was designed to study the feasibility of creating an alternative writing assessment that…