The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Practice Guide, "Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers," offers educators four specific, evidence-based recommendations that address the challenge of teaching writing in elementary school. This summary focuses on the first of the four recommendations: Providing adequate time for…

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the current literature regarding beginning writers, with a particular focus on the cognitive and neuropsychological research that has implications for the translation process during writing. This overview will highlight specific theories with direct relevance to translation during writing, as well as…

When being a student in grade school as well as in high school (1934-1946), grammar was heavily emphasized in English/language arts classes, particularly in grades four through the senior year in high school. Evidently, teachers and school administrators then saw a theoretical way to assist pupils in writing achievement. Grammar and writing were…

In this article, the author shares his experience in teaching persuasive writing to 3rd graders. He began his instruction with a focus on how he could shift the students from rote work on persuasive pieces to actually writing to persuade. For students, careful modeling is the linchpin of any new learning. So, to begin a unit on persuasive writing,…

For the past few years the author has been studying the writing lives of teachers, first analyzing the contributions of teachers to National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) journals for the ten-year period between 1998 and 2008 and then surveying and interviewing teacher-authors whose works appeared during that period to learn more about…

In this era of high-stakes testing and densely packed state standards, it is too easy for writing to become a meaningless process, useful only for school. Many strategies can help to get all students writing, but this author set out to find a strategy to help students see the power of writing and to know that their voices matter. Writing groups…

Understanding how individuals interact with texts in situated writing acts and what goes into the process of writing in various social, cultural, and educational contexts has recently been laid out as a broadened research agenda for cultural studies of writing within the framework of intercultural rhetoric. However, there is a paucity of classroom…

Modern secondary courses in English differ from classical tradition in their tendency to avoid direct instruction in the content and style of writing. Such avoidance is partly a function of anxieties about the role of English in students' personal development and a fear of limiting their self expression. Neither of the dominant writing pedagogies…

This article contests the prevailing assumption that composition scholarship has only recently begun to theorize the role of the writing program administrator. While many contemporary scholars accept the idea that the field mainly offered practical "how-to" articles early on in its history, the author rereads work from past decades to show…

This article describes LIT 730: Teaching Composition, a three-credit graduate seminar in American University's Department of Literature for master's-degree students interested in teaching composition. The Literature Department offers both an MA in Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing, and attracts applicants with a flexible "teaching…

Background: Handwriting legibility systematically biases evaluations in that highly legible handwriting results in more positive evaluations than less legible handwriting. Because performance assessments in educational contexts are not only based on computerized or multiple choice tests but often include the evaluation of handwritten work samples,…

I draw upon Eileen Schell's notions of "maternal pedagogy" and an "ethic of care" to analyze archival material from the National Education Association and Educational Testing Service pilot "lay reader" programs of the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that there are striking similarities between the material and social circumstances of these postwar lay…

This study examines how changes in a key scientific genre supported anthropology's early twentieth-century bid for scientific status. Combining spatial theories of genre with inflections from the register of economics, I develop the concept of "rhetorical scarcity" to characterize this genre change not as evolution but as manipulation that…

This article explores how a preschool writing community in an inclusive classroom provided the space for children to enact a critical literacy stance when they reconceptualized jail from being a place where "bad" people are taken to a place that people are sometimes placed because they perform acts of social justice. This case study highlights how…

Place plays an indelible role in the way people perceive and come to understand the world around them. Place influences their interactions by shaping the genres, texts, and languages they use as writers and readers. Therefore, writing that's tied to place and community encourages students to seriously consider the effects of these interactions,…