How did an expressivist course, "Writing from Experience," anomalously come to spend 29 years in Cornell's writing in the disciplines First-Year Writing Seminar program? In answering this question, the author provides a telling example of the forces that propel or impede curricular change and analyzes how, as a result of these forces,…

Concern about students' writing skills has led to recommendations that elementary teachers receive more professional development in how to teach writing (National Commission on Writing, 2006). However, there is currently little evidence about the knowledge teachers need to teach writing well, and it is therefore difficult for teacher…

Many EFL teachers spend a lot of time marking students' written assignments and correcting their spelling, grammatical, punctuation, organization and idea generation errors in detail. The more students make mistakes, the more meticulously they mark and correct mistakes. Despite meticulous error correction, students continue to make the same…

Using Mikhail Bakhtin's conceptions of dialogue, monologue, and chronotope, the authors ask readers to consider how different values and actions ultimately create the teaching and learning spaces in which children are recognized as literate. Using qualitative data that focus on the relational writing practices of two preschoolers, this…

This article shares the story of one student writer that shows how the challenges of writing from sources are tied to issues of voice and authority. Keith was a student in the author's first college writing class in the fall of 2002. As he undertook a transition from high school to college writer, the author was transitioning from high school to…

The instructor-led peer conference, a lesser-known approach to peer response involving both students and teachers, affords significant opportunities for collaborative learning and apprenticeship in the teaching of composition. This article uses sociocultural theories of learning to examine video-recorded episodes from two instructor-led peer…

In this article, I demonstrate how the use of reflective writing assignments in first-year composition facilitated students' understanding of their own writing process strategies. I first discuss the theoretical roots from which reflective practice among student writers grows. Next, I employ my students' voices to demonstrate that reflection…

The third goal of Zen practice, helping others achieve enlightenment, suggests that teachers should help students learn about their own composing practices and histories as part of their instruction, but they cannot help others until they learn to help themselves by reflecting on their own processes and histories, becoming enlightened, and…

The purpose of this article is to describe the vexing issues that arise as researchers try to define and assess the knowledge teachers need to teach reading and writing effectively in the primary grades. Over the past several years, the authors of this article have developed and tested an assessment system of teacher knowledge under a grant titled…

In this qualitative study, the career journey of one New Zealand woman was analysed. Three key findings emerged: the power of narrative as a vehicle for this woman's story, her movement towards greater authenticity and spiritual fulfilment as a mature woman, and the ongoing struggle for concurrent fulfilment from communal and agentic perspectives.…

The feminized labor of composition studies is usually seen as being in service of, or subservient to, literary studies, ignoring composition's disaffective position against other fields, specifically creative writing. Viewing composition studies' complex labor histories in tandem with the meteoric rise of creative writing allows for a new way of…

While longitudinal research within the field of writing studies has contributed to our understanding of postsecondary students' writing development, there has been less attention given to the discursive resources students bring with them into writing classrooms and how they make use of these resources in first-year composition courses. This…

Understanding how best to support immature writers in the development of their understanding of the writing process is an important concern for researchers and teachers. Social technologies have become key features of leisure and work place writing, yet knowledge about how to design educational settings that take full advantage of the affordances…

A distinction must be made between "computer-generated scoring" and "computer-generated feedback". Computer-generated scoring refers to the provision of automated scores derived from mathematical models built on organizational, syntactic, and mechanical aspects of writing. In contrast, computer-generated feedback, the focus of this article, refers…

Textbooks and grammar worksheets do not adequately convey to students how readers or listeners are shaped by the language of the writer. The best way to help students understand the emphasis of a dash or another device is to see one used during a suspenseful moment in a dramatic selection. It is up to the teacher to select dramatic works that…