The authors aim to assist teachers to gain a deeper understanding of the inner lives of students especially those with special educational needs. This aim is pursued in two ways. The first is an exploration of the experience of writing poetry using the students' sentiments, actual words and phrases--a poetic engagement. The second is to argue for…

Students with disabilities often struggle with writing tasks. In order to improve the written expression performance of high school students with deficits in written expression, a Direct Instruction writing program was implemented. The participants were six high school students in programs for individuals with learning disabilities. Three of the…

The theme for the 62nd annual conference of the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers was Educating for a Just Society. Connie Briggs, previous Program Chair, reminded us that, "Education has always been the foundation of a democratic nation. It is important that our students understand the principles upon which our nation was…

The purpose of this study was to address a writing teacher's perspective about integrating Facebook, a social networking site, into a university-level English writing course in Taiwan. Data, including interviews with the teacher and class postings on Facebook, were analyzed inductively, qualitatively, and interpretively, resulting in three…

Due to a rapid development and expansion of technology and, as a result, Web 2.0 technologies are providing both teachers and learners with new solutions to the limitations of traditional method in the field of language teaching and learning. The research compared students' writing ability before and after they were taught through blog, a new…

This study reports the effect of a treatment tool called "Babudoh's comprehension therapy" in enhancing the comprehension and writing skills of 10 junior secondary school students with congenital and profound hearing impairment in Plateau State, Nigeria. The study adopted the single group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental research…

Abydos is a professional development program that includes a three-week writing institute. It provides school districts with teachers who, after a year of implementation and another year of professional development, can train other teachers, thus providing ongoing staff development. The Houston Independent School District (HISD) implemented Abydos…

In "Teaching with Vision," two respected scholars in teaching for social justice have gathered teachers from across the country to describe rich examples of extraordinary practice. This collection showcases the professional experience and wisdom of classroom teachers who have been navigating standards- and test-driven teaching environments in…

Research on evidence-based writing intervention practices as well as reliable and valid assessments of elementary-aged students' writing fluency has been lacking compared to other academic areas (i.e., reading). Performance feedback interventions targeting writing fluency are gaining empirical support (Eckert et al., 2006); however, growth…

Young adolescents should be able to write organized multi-paragraph compositions that develop a central idea and unfold in logical and sequential order, unified through the use of transitional words and phrases. In other words, the compositions should not just consist of a string of related sentences, but represent a dynamic text that has…

This article suggests that the methodology of community-based action research provides concrete strategies for fostering effective community problem solving. To argue for a community research pedagogy, the author draws upon past and present scholarship in action research and participatory action research, experiences teaching an undergraduate…

Today's high-stakes testing world has changed the English classroom a great deal, and perhaps one of the most dramatically affected areas has been that of creative writing. As all English teachers well know, creative writing does not easily lend itself to a multiple-choice test or a five-paragraph essay. As the authors began the push to prepare…

In the summers of 2007 and 2008 St. John's University's faculty arrived in Rome and spent two weeks working together at the university's campus in the Prati section of Rome as participants in a program that was half faculty writing retreat and half writing across the curriculum faculty development workshop. The focus of the St. John's University…

Adolescent writers in second language settings often spend the majority of their school days in content area courses, such as math, science, and social studies, where they must negotiate challenging literacy tasks in their second languages with little explicit writing instruction. While genre scholars have built an extensive body of knowledge…

Direct corpus use by learners or learner concordancing has been hailed as one of the promising areas that can revolutionize L2 writing and language pedagogy as a whole ([Conrad, 2000] and [Hyland, 2003]). It has been discussed to promote data-driven learning (Johns, 1988), to provide authentic contexts in which linguistic items are used, and to…