Any child who has ever negotiated his or her bedtime, pleaded for items in the grocery store, or asked to attend a community event has practiced the art of persuasive argument. Why not bring that expertise into the classroom to introduce children to the fundamentals of persuasive writing? According to elementary educator Brandi Clark, picture…

We evaluated a multicomponent intervention for improving the cover-letter writing skills of individuals with intellectual disabilities. An intervention that included modeling, self-monitoring, prompting, and feedback increased correct performance for all participants. In addition, the skill was demonstrated across audiences.

Scholars and teachers often focus only on alphabetic texts in the classroom (Palmeri; Alexander and Rhodes; Jewitt; Selfe; Shipka); however, we do our students a disservice if we do not prepare them to compose with and understand the rhetorical consequences of using a variety of modes. In this article, I argue that we need to teach our students to…

English 3820: Scientific Writing, a writing-intensive (WI) course offered by the Department of English at East Carolina University (ECU), serves primarily science majors. According to the course catalog, it provides students with "practice in assimilation and written presentation of scientific information." The course asks students to…

Based on our own experiences teaching grammar in developmental writing classes and classes not dedicated to writing instruction, along with a history of scholarship that indicates a need for grammar pedagogies (e.g., Dougherty, 2012), instructor-designed grammar games can likely help facilitate learning about these mechanics of writing while…

Recent studies have argued that tutor feedback is failing to support students' progression. The potential for peer feedback, i.e. feedback composed by peer assessors, to support learning has been under researched. The aim of this paper was to explore a case study of a peer assessor composing and receiving peer feedback. The paper reports a case…

In order to meet writing objectives specified in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), many teachers need to make significant changes in how writing is taught. While CCSS identified what students need to master, it did not provide guidance on how teachers are to meet these writing benchmarks. The current article presents research-supported…

In this literacy narrative, the author reflects on how an assignment in graduate school changed from a confusing task to an exciting window through which he began to look into the intellectual and epistemological bases of education in the United States. While doing so, the author also briefly discusses the pedagogical implications of using…

Where academic literacies are understood as situated social practices, effective academic literacy support needs to reflect the disciplinary and institutional specificity of the practices. However, the institutional separation of academic literacy teaching from disciplinary subject teaching, typical of UK universities, creates significant…

Aim/Purpose: Quality in higher education assumes the challenge of developing in all citizens of the 21st century the cognitive, motivational, and socio-cultural dimensions that provide them with communication competences including the use of information and communication technologies, for the dissemination of sustainable scientific knowledge in…

In South Africa, inequalities endemic to HE systems worldwide are further compounded by apartheid legacies. Despite an intensive focus for over twenty years on how pedagogic intervention could be harnessed to address these inequalities, black students' participation and success rates in South African HE remain stubbornly low, suggesting a need for…

Despite the growing number of heritage language (HL) learners in language courses, the interaction between second language (L2) and HL learners has not been fully explored in the research, and thus, it still remains unclear whether mixed (L2-HL) or matched (L2-L2, HL-HL) dyads are more beneficial for language learning. This study investigates…

This paper addresses how the Writing Center, a common writing support service originated in the USA, takes shape and evolves as it finds new homes in universities in the Asia-Pacific Region. Using the available literature on existing writing centers in scholarly databases, the paper explores the motivations behind the establishment of these…

This book presents an international range of conversation analytic (CA) studies of classroom interaction which all discuss their empirical findings in terms of their theoretical and methodological contribution to the field of second language studies and their potential pedagogical relevance. The volume is thus unique in its focus on the…

It is now relatively straightforward to program software to detect words and phrases containing errors in the free-form writing of L2 learners of English. This article, however, reports on progress in the development of software which not only detects errors but also provides feedback explaining the nature of each error and how to correct it. Such…