Academic writing is a mainstay of expression in secondary schools. However, many students think of academic writing in terms of local operations that include spelling, punctuation, use of third person, and so on. Teachers may expect mastery of local operations, but often they want students to navigate the terrain of the content area or discipline…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether technically adequate curriculum-based measures of writing could be identified for use with high school students. The participants included 10th-grade general and special education students from two public school districts in Wisconsin. Students (n = 82) completed two narrative writing samples in…

This article describes the use of African American English (AAE) in the written and oral language of African American adolescents who struggle with writing. Written and oral language samples of 22 African American 10th-grade students were transcribed, analyzed, and coded for AAE, grammatical errors, spelling errors, and punctuation errors. Four…