Eight students who excelled in a statewide, middle school creative writing tournament discussed their relationships with writing. Students' interview transcripts were analyzed for references to positive and negative teacher influences. Students needed teachers who provided structured writing time and clear deadlines, valued the message of the work…

Higher education has become increasingly concerned in recent years with its role in sustainability studies, both in the sustainability of the physical environments of its institutions and in the education of students as citizens and experts in a world facing complex environmental, economic, and social challenges. This review essay discusses the…

The following article maps the questions, methods, contexts, and theories presented in published scholarship on writing-related transfer. While not exhaustive, this review attempts to capture representative samples with a focus on recent publications. The article then highlights a multi-institutional research initiative that aims to flesh out the…

Drawing and writing in response to picturebook read-alouds, elementary children construct varying "visual hooks" in their sketches as effective visual devices for extending ideas for writing: the bubble hook, the zoom hook, and the group hook. This article reports on a 12-week qualitative study in which children in second grade develop as writers…

"Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition"[R] ("CIRC"[R]) is a reading and writing program for students in grades 2-6. It has three principal elements: story-related activities, direct instruction in reading comprehension, and integrated language arts/writing. Daily lessons provide students with an opportunity to practice…

"The Spalding Method"[R] is a language arts program for grades K-6 that uses explicit, integrated instruction and multisensory techniques to teach spelling, writing, and reading. The program and its textbook, "The Writing Road to Reading," provide 32 weeks of lesson plans. Students work on program materials in spelling,…

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the EUROCALL society succeeded in holding the 28th EUROCALL conference, EUROCALL2020, on 20-21 August as an online, two-day gathering. The transition process required to make this happen was demanding and insightful for everyone involved, and, in many ways, a logical consequence of the core content and purpose of…

Self-regulated strategy development instruction or SRSD is a method developed for teaching students how and what to think while writing. SRSD instruction for the persuasive writing strategy POW (Pick my idea, Organize notes, Write and Say more) + TREE (Topic sentence, Reasons, Explain reasons, Ending) helps students by teaching them to develop…

In these austere and uncertain financial times, colleges are caught in a quandary: they need to admit a certain number of students each term in order to make budget, yet many of the students they admit are developmental in nature by virtue of their critical thinking, writing and/or math scores on their entrance exams. Creative colleges are…

This article examines Donald M. Murray's ideas about what he considered the essential solitude of all writing and what happens within that solitude. Murray, a pioneer of the process and modern expressivism movements in composition, identified a number of forces that he felt were at work within his mind whenever he wrote; this complicated aloneness…

This article examines the disjunction between, on the one hand, critical theory's critique of the privileging of authorial intent in protocols of textual interpretation, and, on the other hand, continued obeisance to authorial intent in composition textbooks and pedagogy. By unpacking the implications of this disjunction, I show the limitations…

At first sight the speech mark would seem to be one of the easiest to use of all punctuation marks. After all, all one has to do is take the piece of speech or written language and surround it with the appropriately shaped marks. But, are speech marks as easy to understand and use as suggested above, especially for young children beginning their…

Humans synthesize whenever they see links between ideas they have gleaned from other sources. Human brains operate by seeing patterns and trying to make linkages. As students learn about a topic through creating a text-based presentation, they might have varying conceptual understandings of how they can combine their ideas with the information…

To define ethics as a mode of inquiry, it is first important to consider how ethics relates to critical thinking. Put simply, ethical inquiry is one type of inquiry required to think critically. A connection between critical thinking and ethics is only possible, however, when ethics is defined not as a static list of rules but as a "mode of…

Academic and scientific literacy experts agree that becoming literate in an academic discipline involves coordinating language learning, and thinking in increasingly sophisticated ways to enable participation in discipline practices of knowledge construction. Despite this knowledge, understanding of writing pedagogies in tertiary science are in…