A teacher's response is a key element in students' motivation and achievement in college writing courses. The area of Written Corrective Feedback (Ferris, 1999; Truscott, 1996) has been extensively studied in second language (L2) writing scholarship, but that research, to date, has not elucidated why individual instructors respond to students'…

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's writing textbook, "They Say / I Say," has triggered important debates among writing professionals. Not included within these debates, however, is the empirical question of whether the textbook's templates reflect patterns of language use in actual academic discourses. This article uses corpus-based…

This brief commentary first clarifies Brandt's concept of sponsors of literacy in light of the way the concept has been taken up in writing studies. Then it treats Brandt's methods for handling accounts of literacy learning in comparison with other ways of analyzing biographical material. Finally it takes up Lawrence's argument about literacy…

Neither the pervasiveness of writing in everyday life nor the movement of people across international borders is abating. Global migration has increased 33% since 2000, leaving millions of people negotiating family, politics, and money across borders. Likewise, according to Deborah Brandt's recent book, "The Rise of Writing," more people…

Despite the growing interest in investigating the pedagogical application of Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) systems, studies on the process of AWE-supported writing are still scant. Adopting activity theory as the framework, this qualitative study aims to examine how students incorporated AWE feedback into their writing in an English as a…

Composition theory and pedagogy have variously understood writing as a noun or as a verb, a product or a process. This paper proposes a shift to theorizing writing as a gerund (writing "g.") and argues that this approach opens a space for more productive composition theory. A gerund orientation focuses attention on the virtual and…

With the purpose of describing the rhetorical preferences in composition, a field that has not received adequate attention in genre research, this article reports on an exploratory analysis of the moves and steps that make up research article introductions in the journals "Written Communication" and "Journal of Second Language…

Research investigating corpora of English learners' language raises new questions about how syntactic complexity is defined theoretically and operationally for second language (L2) writing assessment. I show that syntactic complexity is important in construct definitions and L2 writing rating scales as well as in L2 writing research. I describe…

As texts enact historically situated ways of making knowledge, intertextual analysis through citation patterns can shed some light on a community's epistemologies. The present research seeks a deeper understanding of the theoretical trends, the influences, and the emerging disciplinary configuration of the writing studies community in Latin…

In this article, I review influential contributions made by writing-studies researchers to the research literature on literacy sponsorship. Through this review, I show how subsequent studies have reiterated three basic assumptions of Deborah Brandt's pioneering oral-history project. However, I also demonstrate that later writing-studies research…

In this article the author combines Chinese literary theory and new materialism with her ongoing research into creative writing. In the opening section, the author discusses how language and writing can be approached using new materialist theories. She then enters into a creative non-fiction "research-creation" piece that explores how…

In this article, we investigate a new construct for conceptualizing learning transfer with writing knowledge: Transformative Experience (TE). With origins in educational psychology, TE has been effective for promoting transfer with scientific concepts in previous research, but not yet considered in relation to writing or other presumably…

Although the concept of contrastive rhetoric has received considerable attention in research on second language writing, it has not been adequately examined in a linguistically complex context such as Tunisia. This study is an attempt to contribute to the growing body of research on second language writing through investigating the validity of the…

Ethnographers are particularly interested in writing. They have paid particular attention to the practices of making field notes and to the ways in which their public texts represent those that they have encountered and studied. To date there has been less attention paid to the kinds of writing that used to make sense of experiences in the field.…

Over the past 20 years, claims about how and why student writing can serve learning have changed markedly. This has been partly due to new technologies displacing writing as a predominant resource for learning, prompting new sense-making practices and shifts in how these changes are theorized. Learners now routinely collaborate to generate,…