Although writing is considered one of the most essential foreign language skills, to nurture and develop writing skills among students is challenging. To overcome this, teachers have recently considered benefiting from digital technology. Self-monitoring and self-evaluation, as sub-skills of metacognition, in addition to scaffolding, might be…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) emphasize disciplinary literacy by making literacy instruction every teacher's responsibility (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). The CCSS require content area teachers to adapt curriculum and pedagogy to support disciplinary literacy…

This paper reports on findings from a classroom study on the introduction and effectiveness of new methods of instruction using English literature in a Japanese high school setting. It is based on data compiled during a two-year research project. In this paper, we will detail the investigation and findings from an analysis of student questionnaire…

This paper documents the perceptions and experiences of faculty members in the midst of statewide reform efforts in Virginia and North Carolina to integrate developmental reading and writing courses. Using interview and focus group data from 161 faculty and administrators in both states (combined) as well as three detailed case studies of faculty…

This article theorizes teaching as accommodation and argues for a centering of disability in writing pedagogy. It examines how universal design can improve composition classrooms, applying inclusive principles to the syllabus in particular. In this article, the author takes up these intersecting issues: academic accommodations, disability, and…

Often, themes in work and life intertwine; the author recognized that a cadre of poems she had written during the past several years were about relationship dissolution. The poems concerned romantic and friendship dissolution and the aspects of identity creation and loss this entails. The author presents the poems and makes an explicit connection…

The "Toolbox" column features content adapted from ReadWriteThink.org lesson plans and provides practical tools for classroom teachers. This issue's column features a lesson plan adapted from "Graphing Plot and Character in a Novel" by Lisa Storm Fink and "Bio-graph: Graphing Life Events" by Susan Spangler. Students retell biographic events…

This article describes a literature circle of seven pre-service teacher education students who read "Al Capone Shines My Shoes" (G. Choldenko, 2009). Students used the Internet to complete their roles, shared what they learned as they discussed the book, and then wrote about the digital experience. Four themes emerged from an analysis of…

This paper explores how to teach English writing to big classes in China from the task-based perspective. Based on a comparison between the traditional 3Ps approach and the tasked-based approach, the paper proposes a practical linear procedure as to how to teach English writing in the task-based classroom to big classes. An empirical study is…

This article describes the use of "Writing to Learn" assignments in a course on the Theology of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. These short, informal assignments promote active learning by focusing on writing as a process for critical thinking and as a way to learn the content of the course. They help students creatively engage…

This chapter will describe the evolution of a study of graduate education students' needs as writers. Recognizing that many of my students--who would soon be teaching children to write--struggled with various aspects of writing, I began a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) study to examine (a) my students' perceptions of…

The traditional lab report is known to create several pedagogical shortcomings in the introductory physics course, particularly with regard to promoting student engagement and encouraging quality writing. This paper discusses the use of a "letter home" written to a non-physicist as an alternative to lab reports that creates a more…

It is generally accepted in the literature that writing assignments, even short ones, increase both student writing ability and comprehension of the material covered in the assignments. As class enrollments increase, particularly at the introductory level, however, instructors often sacrifice writing assignments because of the difficulty in…

This article will describe a writing assignment designed for use in a liberal arts college whose mission stresses effective written communication both within and across disciplines. In this assignment, students write three separate solutions to the same mathematics problem: one for a mathematical peer, a second for a contemporary that does not…

Writing and communication are essential skills for success in the workplace or in graduate school, yet writing and communication are often the last thing that instructors think about incorporating into a mathematics course. A mathematical modeling course provides a natural environment for writing assignments. This article is an analysis of the…