While the delivery and reception of advice is a practice integral to a wide range of settings, little attention has been given to the detailed practices of advice resistance and how it leads to advice negotiation. Based on 7 hours of videotaped tutoring interactions among 6 tutors and 11 tutees, this conversation analytic study examines the…

Through sharing results of an analysis of design language use in several writing studies journals, this article explores why we invoke design in published scholarship. After defining the approach to composing known as design thinking, it then moves to a comparison of design thinking and the writing process and looks at an example application of…

This article makes a case for recording and using dreams in the teaching of writing. Calling on some well-known statements of Freud and on some recent research, I attempt to show how dreams can provide writers with a route to their unconscious. I also illustrate the role of dreams in furnishing writers with inspiration and source material. I…

This column explores the idea of using 21st-century mentor texts to guide students in the development of critical literacy. The column focuses on one example from the U.S. presidential election of 2012 to illustrate how teachers might engage students to unpack the socially constructed nature of literacy. The author argues that the changing reading…

Composition historians have recently worked to recover histories of composition in normal schools. This essay argues, however, that historians have inadvertently misconstrued the role of normal schools in American education by inaccurately comparing rhetorical education in normal schools to rhetorical education in colleges and universities.…

Within the current political and educative context, where high-stakes standardized assessments create a pressure-filled experience for teachers to "teach to the test," time spent on writing instruction that supports students in transferring their learning between classroom and assessment contexts is crucial. Teachers who must use prompts to…

Second language writing teachers face numerous challenges when providing feedback on student writing. There may be so many problems in the writing that is almost impossible for them to focus on or they may constantly seek a better method of giving feedback on student written errors. This paper attempts to provide second language writing teachers…

This case study examined dynamic interactions of two small teams of English as Second Language students when they performed two collaborative argument writing tasks in asynchronous and synchronous web-based contexts. The two teams exhibited different interaction patterns when switching between contexts. These patterns were identified in terms of…

Music is often regarded as a thing of the creative realm, something that sits to the side of the main core subjects, but music in the classroom shows music can be much more than a complement to a poetry unit. The author's journey through the Country Music Hall of Fame's Words & Music program revealed that delving into the world of songwriting…

This study explored the value of using a "guided rubric" to enable students participating in a massive open online course in writing to produce more reliable assessments of their fellow students' writing. To test the assumption that training students to assess will improve their ability to provide quality feedback, a multivariate…

This article describes the complex cognitive and linguistic challenges of summarizing expository text at vocabulary, syntactic, and rhetorical levels. It then outlines activities to help ABE/ESL learners develop corresponding skills.

U.S. adolescents' prior technology experiences and exposure to digital genres vary, but they will often write digital texts as they enter college and adulthood. We explored middle school students' digital writing instructional experience in the context of a university-based summer digital writing camp. The sixth- through eighth-grade adolescents…

How young children's and older students' knowledge of words develops--their structure, their meanings, how they work in context--is reflected in the Common Core English Language Arts expectations. Meeting these expectations for each learner requires that we teach in a developmentally-responsive manner. This includes our being familiar with the…

An understanding of noun positions in sentences can correct many recurring problems in the writing of English language learners. This article outlines an approach for anticipating and preventing these sorts of errors while providing a framework to explain the errors to students. For this approach to be successful, students need to have an…

The descriptive paragraph and subsequent essay are usually among the first assignments students must complete in composition classes. Typically, students are told to describe their childhood home, a person of importance, a special object, or a summer vacation. Most students, especially learners of English as a foreign language (EFL), have…