Background: This study examined the use of student-teacher interactions through dynamic assessment (DA) to diagnose and promote the learner's comprehension on Chinese writing patterns. Debates over the uses of standardized tests to assess language learners' performance have been ongoing in the field of second language acquisition for many years.…

This study aimed to investigate problems facing Palestinian Arab students from Israel who are majoring in teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in developing well-written paragraphs in English. They usually transfer the stylistic features of their first language, Arabic to the target language, English. For example, they tend to write long…

This review essay examines recent texts by Nancy Welch and Tony Scott, both of which use embodied activism as a starting point for their inquiries. Taken together, these works point to a distinct shift in composition studies' turn toward the social, one that calls on workers both within and outside the academy to actively engage in grassroots…

In this article, we articulate a framework for making our commitments to racial justice actionable, a framework that moves from narrating confessional accounts to articulating our commitments and then acting on them through both self-work and work-with-others, a dialectic possibility we identify and explore. We model a method for moving beyond…

A national survey of senior secondary English curriculum content has confirmed that contemporary literature predominates among set texts, being seen as an "essential" category for study because of its "relevance" in helping students "understand the world in which they live." Perhaps uncontentious -- depending on the…

This study investigated the engagement with writing of reluctant writers in the contexts of home and school. A structured and semi-structured survey method was used to capture responses from 106 reluctant writers in 9 primary schools (age range 6--9 year olds) in the UK. Findings show that although these students were deemed to be reluctant…

This paper attempts to illustrate the impact of Canadian social, political, and academic discourses on second language writing pedagogy in Ontario schools. Building upon the views that regard teacher knowledge as teachers' sociocultural interactions and lived experiences, and not merely intellectual capabilities gained within teacher preparation,…

Considering veterans in the context of research on adult and nontraditional students in college writing classes, this article proposes Malcolm Knowles's six principles for adult learning as an asset-based heuristic for investigating how writing programs and writing teachers might build upon existing resources to support veteran students.

The aim of written expression studies is to have students explain their knowledge, feelings, ideas and imaginations in a correct and effective manner. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of story map on story writing skills of first grade teacher candidates who study at the Department of Elementary Education. The…

This article challenges faculty members and administrators to rethink current definitions of remediation. First year college students are increasingly placed into basic writing courses due to a perceived inability to use English grammar correctly, but it must be acknowledged that all students will encounter the need for remediation as they attempt…

This article offers a rigorous and researched look at how consumer rhetorics form first-year college students' understandings about life at the university. Examined in the context of consumer culture, students' narratives about university life illustrate how they marshal, appropriate, and deploy consumerist metaphors and to what ends. Using…

This article extends the conversation on English education as preparation for democratic participation. The author journeys through a cycle of action research, analyzing one classroom case study to improve her practice of curricular negotiation in a methods of teaching writing course.

This article shares findings from case studies of two eighteen-year-old songwriters, Bradley and James. The study investigated songwriter motivation, writing methods, and school experiences. Data was collected over the course of one year through two in-depth interviews per songwriter, two teacher interviews, and 101 songwriting artifacts. Grounded…

Learning to write is critical in today's world, yet many students are not developing the writing abilities they need to use writing as a powerful tool for learning and for showing what they know. Research indicates that failure to acquire strong writing abilities restricts opportunities for both post-secondary education and employment. This…

When, why, and how do college students come to value their writing as intellectual property? How do their conceptions of intellectual property reflect broader understandings and personal engagements with concepts of authorship, collaboration, identification, and capital? We address these questions based on findings from the Stanford Study of…