This article discusses one teacher's efforts to give their students a mentor text for a persuasive, research-based writing project. The author's shift from assigning predominantly fiction to focusing more on nonfiction came as a result of their efforts to help their students move from students' current writing style -- that of a five-paragraph…

The article describes how one student in a summer enrichment English class used fictional elements and images in comic form to represent her identity and the emotional truth of difficult experiences. The course was taught at an annual summer academy that encouraged academically minded 15-year-old and 16-year-old students to spend three weeks…

The goal of this practice guide is to offer educators specific, evidence-based recommendations that address the challenges of teaching students in grades 6-12 to write effectively. This guide synthesizes the best publicly available research and shares practices that are supported by evidence. It is intended to be practical and easy for teachers to…

Written corrective feedback (WCF) is an instructional strategy used to help second/foreign language (L2) learners improve their writing effectiveness. Teachers can design and provide WCF across a number of dimensions such as focus (e.g. grammar, organization, content), type (e.g. direct correction, reformulation, comment), and tone (e.g. negative,…

Writing anxiety is one of the most essential factors influencing language learning. The current study is to explore the effect of sentence-making practice on reducing writing anxiety of two classes of adult EFL learners, one in low-intermediate level (LI learners), the other in high-intermediate level (HI learners). Two classes received two-week…

This article reviews insights from place-based education and ecological models of writing to show how these theories can work together to shape locally focused composition pedagogies. From place-based education, the researcher takes an emphasis on physical specificity, and from ecological models of writing, the researcher takes an emphasis on…

"English" classrooms in U.S. institutions of higher education are not linguistically homogeneous. It is not logical, ethical, or realistic to designate "standard" English as the only discourse acceptable for the writing classroom. This praxis-oriented article chronicles a U.S. composition instructor's process of…

The advent of the Common Core State Standards has already begun to affect curriculum and instruction by embracing writing not only in English language arts but in science and technical subjects as well.

While the delivery and reception of advice is a practice integral to a wide range of settings, little attention has been given to the detailed practices of advice resistance and how it leads to advice negotiation. Based on 7 hours of videotaped tutoring interactions among 6 tutors and 11 tutees, this conversation analytic study examines the…

Through sharing results of an analysis of design language use in several writing studies journals, this article explores why we invoke design in published scholarship. After defining the approach to composing known as design thinking, it then moves to a comparison of design thinking and the writing process and looks at an example application of…

This article makes a case for recording and using dreams in the teaching of writing. Calling on some well-known statements of Freud and on some recent research, I attempt to show how dreams can provide writers with a route to their unconscious. I also illustrate the role of dreams in furnishing writers with inspiration and source material. I…

This column explores the idea of using 21st-century mentor texts to guide students in the development of critical literacy. The column focuses on one example from the U.S. presidential election of 2012 to illustrate how teachers might engage students to unpack the socially constructed nature of literacy. The author argues that the changing reading…

Composition historians have recently worked to recover histories of composition in normal schools. This essay argues, however, that historians have inadvertently misconstrued the role of normal schools in American education by inaccurately comparing rhetorical education in normal schools to rhetorical education in colleges and universities.…

Within the current political and educative context, where high-stakes standardized assessments create a pressure-filled experience for teachers to "teach to the test," time spent on writing instruction that supports students in transferring their learning between classroom and assessment contexts is crucial. Teachers who must use prompts to…

Second language writing teachers face numerous challenges when providing feedback on student writing. There may be so many problems in the writing that is almost impossible for them to focus on or they may constantly seek a better method of giving feedback on student written errors. This paper attempts to provide second language writing teachers…