In teaching and researching English for Law, considerable effort has been put into the fine-grained description of legal genres and accounts of associated legal literacy practices. Much of this work has been carried out in the academic context, focusing especially on genres encountered by undergraduate law students. The range of genres which must…

This article provides an introduction to the kind of computer software that is used to score student writing in some high stakes testing programs, and that is being promoted as a teaching and learning tool to schools. It sketches the state of play with machines for the scoring of writing, and describes how these machines work and what they do.…

As students increasingly rely on digital media to locate information, composition instructors must incorporate into writing instruction critical evaluation of and reflection on students' use of Web content. A growing problem in the composition class is underdeveloped critical digital literacy skills. To become fully literate, students need more…

Wilhelm is a vocal advocate for the substantive integration of technology into language arts classes in ways that support the "critical" use of technologies and the learning of new concepts and procedures for reading and composing. He makes the case that no one can be considered fully literate without a familiarity with and appreciation for our…

The purpose of this theoretical essay is to encourage critical reflection of the relationship of specific reading events to traditional conceptualizations of reader stance. While conventional models of reader stance are useful for considering many aspects of reading, there are reading events that engender stances that appear to lie outside of the…

Although models have been a mainstay of academic writing pedagogy for centuries, a recurrent critique has been that they control or limit student writing and misrepresent the affairs they claim to model. These insufficiencies notwithstanding, models are ubiquitous in the ordinary, practical world, and their usefulness to novices can easily go…

This study argues that L2 writing pedagogy needs to give more recognition to the impact emerging from new technological tools and online resources. While shifts in approaches from product to process to genre are well documented in the literature, little research has appreciated the collective influence generated by advances in technology. It is…

After 20 years in the classroom, the author recently returned to graduate school. It wasn't by choice. It was to prove to the "powers that be" at the college where she adjuncts that she is "current" on issues of basic writing. Her master's degree, earned decades before, was insufficient. She was a reluctant student, to say the least; having taught…

Today's Christian college students are more engaged in popular youth culture and less reflective than in the past. St. Augustine's On Christian Doctrine, Book IV, gives advice to preachers, but it can easily be adapted to apply to Christian college composition classrooms. The two main sections of the article cover how to teach and what to teach…

This article reviews some of the work of rhetoric and composition scholars in discussions of place, and to enhance awareness of how place-related factors may limit and/or bolster pedagogies, it presents a case study of two geographically and culturally different student writers at Ohio University. This study describes some of the challenges that…

In this essay, the author argues that the current superficial reading practices in creative writing programs are serving not only to marginalize the discipline from the larger body of English studies, but also to stifle the creative, intellectual, and professional progress of its students. Reading for creative writers must be viewed as a critical…

During colonial times, various British Indian educational institutions and practices, including writing pedagogies at these institutions, introduced modernity to British India. This essay explains the manner in which some students internalized modernity and in their writings used modernist beliefs and premises to critique some precolonial Indian…

The purpose of this review was to identify effective methods for teaching writing to students with intellectual disabilities. After criteria were established, database searches and hand searches of selected peer-reviewed journals were conducted. Findings revealed a relatively small number of studies that met the criteria for inclusion.…

In this study the author draws on Jane Willis' TBL framework and examines its effects on the improvement of EFL learners' writing competence when such a framework is applied to college writing classrooms in Chinese EFL settings, and thus tentatively explores the feasibility of the task-based approach to the teaching of EFL writing. Results of this…

This article, based on research findings, examines the effect of implementing a genre approach to develop writing competency of Year 5 and 6 L2 primary school students. Using action research, the genre approach was implemented over a 10-week term with two lessons per week in a culturally and linguistically diverse ESL class in a South Australian…