Good and plentiful communication often lands high on the list of priorities for families participating in child care programs. Conversely, poor and scarce communication often lands high on the list of reasons parents leave a particular child care program. There are many types of communication to consider when meeting families' needs. While in most…

Post-structuralism, a theory of signs for written texts, would seem an obvious resource for a field like Composition Studies that has "writing" at its center. Yet the post-structuralist turn in Composition Studies is hamstrung by the deep division between camps in the field that are committed to political critique on the one hand or to…

The word "idea" assumed special meaning in composition studies when Stephen M. North, in "The Idea of a Writing Center," showed how an idea can evoke and ignite intense expectations and aversions surrounding literacy instruction. In particular, North lamented the "false sense of knowing" that made getting a message through (in this case, about…

In middle school, the focus of writing instruction shifts away from narrative writing to more academic writing. In the process, many students become less engaged as they respond to inauthentic prompts; additionally, their writing becomes stilted and formulaic. This article addresses the role narrative writing plays by acting as a springboard to…

Focusing on matters of power and difference, this article examines rhetorical theories of genre and James Gee's theory of Discourse. Although both theories offer productive ways of understanding literate practice, it is argued, they are limited in crucial respects. Genre theory offers few ways of understanding how and why some social actors have…

This article discusses three sets of challenges involved in the assessment of writing from a developmental perspective. These challenges include defining a workable theory of development, developing a suitable construct, and overcoming limitations in technocentric approaches to writing assessment. In North America in recent years, a burgeoning…

Writing is a critical emergent literacy skill that lays the foundation for children's later literacy skills and reading achievement. Recent work indicates that many early childhood programs offer children materials and tools for engaging in writing activities but teachers rarely are seen modeling writing for children or scaffolding children's…

Andrea, a doctoral student in education, has a demanding schedule. She has a young child, a job, a house on the market, and a spouse who travels so much that she can only see him on certain weekends. To cope with these unavoidable distractions to her research, she found the writing center and was paired with a fellow graduate student, Charisse.…

Previous transfer researchers within writing studies have made tremendous gains in understanding how social contexts and curricula influence writing behaviors. In this article, we argue that individual dispositions, such as motivation, value, and self-efficacy, need to occupy a more central focus in writing transfer research. After describing…

This article examines the narrative discourses that shape representations of disability in newspapers in postsocialist Ukraine, arguing that narratives about disability are linked to a meta-discourse of "transition" that emphasizes disorder. Further, newspaper coverage prescribes competing and contradictory models of citizenship and…

In this study, I examine the instruction of four preservice English teachers (PSTs) for cognitively demanding literature-based writing tasks in order to investigate the types of tasks that PSTs identify as cognitively demanding, how PSTs' instruction for such tasks maintains or degrades the task's intellectual rigor, and possible influences and/or…

Students (n = 244, 76% MSSW) and faculty members (n = 40, 36% tenure or tenure track) at a social work program at a large public southern U.S. university were surveyed to assess within- and between-group differences in perspectives on student writing. Faculty members expressed significantly greater concern with student writing than students.…

This action research examines how Generation 1.5 preservice teachers develop as writers during writing intensive courses. Generation 1.5 reflects immigrants who have life experiences inclusive of two or more countries including diverse cultures and languages (Roberge, 2009). Understanding the factors impacting how Generation 1.5 students use…

In the past fifteen years, Web 2.0 social networking technologies have ushered in a new era of information production, distribution and consumption with significant implications for language teaching and learning. An example of such technology is Moodle, which is a learning management system with several useful features that can transform the…

For undergraduate students to achieve science literacy, they must first develop information literacy skils. These skills align with Information Literacy Standards and include determining appropriate databases, distinguishing among resource types, and citing resources ethically. To effectively improve information literacy and science literacy, we…