The National Commission on Writing for America's Families, Schools, and Colleges (2006) specifies that writing-across-the-curriculum programs (including post-secondary coursework) should be well supported. The National Writing Project (NWP) is a group that understands this issue, believing that teachers must be comfortable and confident with…

This article features an overview of two case studies, each featuring a successful literacy coach and the context of the urban elementary school in which she worked. The article describes improvements in reading and writing instruction and improvements in overall school culture that study participants attributed to the influence of these coaches.…

McCarry, a first grade teacher, formed a voluntary writing group, Writers' Lunch Club, that met the developmental and individual needs of children and inspired enthusiasm and writing success. In the article, she explains the guidelines, compares the club's writing strategies with those in the classroom, and lists tips and benefits.

The goal of this study was to design and evaluate fluency-based training units to help students eliminate inconcision. Participants first completed a 1.5-hr lesson on writing concisely and then a 5-min test during which they edited sentences containing inconcise text from the training units. Subsequently, participants were randomly assigned to an…

To attract and retain more students, colleges are increasingly attempting to maximize their academic offerings by including intensive classes. These abbreviated or condensed courses, which are typically available during the summer and sometimes during winter intersession, provide students with an opportunity to move quickly through required…

This paper presents a detailed examination of learning transfer from a university English as a second language (ESL) writing course to a writing task with characteristics very different from the kind of writing done in this ESL writing course but typical of the kind of writing required in other academic courses (i.e., involving text-responsible…

In the present study, participants were 127 3rd-grade students, to 64 of whom (33 boys, 31 girls) the authors taught a general strategy and a genre-specific strategy for planning and writing stories; procedures for regulating the use of these strategies, the writing process, and their writing behaviors; and knowledge about the basic purpose and…

How literacy develops has been of interest to scholars and practitioners of literacy for at least the past century. The Vygotskian perspective of literacy emphasizes social interaction but places les emphasis on stages of behavior. Children build new concepts by interacting with others, such as teachers, who either provide feedback or help them…

"It really helps knowing that you are going to have someone around to help you..." This short article reports on research taking place into peer writing tutorials at London Metropolitan University and examines in particular, the experiences of psychology students who have taken part in the scheme. Some of the implications of this…

Writing and publishing are crucial to the development of a successful academic career. However, lecturers typically receive little guidance on this strand of their job. Any support that does exist tends to focus on the technical and practical aspects of scholarly writing. Advice is rarely provided on managing creative and emotional facets--factors…

Welcome to the Pine Cone Wars, as enacted by Mrs. Kay's children in her urban first grade. The children brought these wars from the playground to the classroom, reformulating them within the possibilities and constraints of the daily writing time. The Pine Cone Wars thus illustrate the inevitable interplay between the official world we shape as…

In this article, we propose to link the study of writing-to-learn to the theory of aptitude-treatment interaction (ATI). In an experimental study we examined the effects of a course on ''Writing-to-learn about literary stories'' consisting of writing tasks adapted to either a planning or a revising writing strategy. We hypothesized that the…

Sharpening our approaches to methodology in self-study research can strengthen our work and clarify questions that arise for readers unfamiliar with this research genre. Our article considers three methodologies--narrative, auto-ethnography and self-study--that privilege self in the research design, believing that addressing self can contribute to…

School districts across the nation have pursued writing across the curriculum since the early 1980s. But writing is something that many technology educators are just starting to implement in their classes. Some instructors have shown a lot of apprehension about including writing in their curriculum and daily assignments. After taking a writing…

Creative writing has been the ugly stepsister in the English discipline for years. On one side, the literature scholars carry the torch for pure language, and, on the other side, the composition and rhetoric theorists approach writing like a science. Somewhere off in a dark corner, the creative writing staff loiters, getting paid to do nothing…