The author pushes two desks together in the front of the class and pile supplies on them: markers, drawing paper, rulers, and pencils. As the students enter a combined English language arts (ELA) and English as a New Language (ENL) tenth-grade classroom, they select what they need and settle in to their work. As an ELA educator who is also a…

Along with forty-nine other high school students, as the author recounts of their student, Meghan is part of an elective two-week academic writing workshop. Each day begins with a freewrite exercise like this one, designed to help students develop what the workshop directors call "fluency." Like Meghan, many students write prolifically…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what the nation's students know and can do in various subjects such as mathematics, reading, science, and writing. The results of NAEP are released as The Nation's Report Card. District staff play an essential role in NAEP.…

This article shares a study of an interview/writing project for adolescent girls, which was a component of the Girls Writing Science Project at a diverse urban high school in the Southwestern United States. The group of high school girls planned, initiated, conducted, and wrote interview profiles of women scientists from their local community.…

English and Chinese have typological differences in finiteness. English has morphological finite and nonfinite distinction, whereas Chinese has no morphological finiteness, and multiple verbs in a clause appear in the form of bare verbs with optional aspectual morphemes, such as the perfective morpheme "le". The current study explores…

Academic language is a kind of social language for the purpose of schooling. It is central to disciplinary learning, thinking, and communication. This study examined adolescents' use of academic language in informational writing, a genre highly valued in school, workplace, and society. Ninety-three seventh and ninth grade students from a U.S.…

Teacher feedback is an essential part which can not be overlooked in English writing teaching. Whether teacher feedback is effective and which type of feedback is more effective in improving learners' writing proficiency have attracted more and more researchers' attention. Direct feedback is the feedback that teachers correct students' errors…

In 2009, President Obama called for a simplification of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), resulting in the average family completing the FAFSA in 20 minutes. Yet, during the 2013-2014 college application season, nearly 900,000 Pell Grant-eligible high school graduates did not complete the FAFSA, leaving $2.9 billion in Pell…

While teaching in Taiwan, Ah-Young Song found that asking students for midterm self-reflections helped them to be more attuned to their distinct educational trajectories and that their comments provided useful insights into adjustments that could be made as a teacher. This article describes how two of those English language learners from the…

We explored whether task complexity, operationalized by the two types of writing prompts, affects EFL high school students' narrative writing in terms of syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, fluency, cohesion, and text quality. 32 intermediate EFL students who were randomly assigned to two prompt groups completed a written narrative task…

If interactions contribute to identity formation, (Swain, et. al., 2011, p. 87) then there is a socio-cultural component to identity. While it is impossible to label identity because of its ever-evolving nature, attempts can be made to gain insight into a person's perceived actions and use those actions as data for exploring possible identity…

Tensions between high school writing curricula and students' lived literacies persist in spite of burgeoning research in multimodal composition. Drawn from the second iteration of a multi-year formative experiment, this narrative explores the dissonance stemming from the meeting of these two worlds in a project titled Digital Self Portrait. This…

Nonnative speakers of a language are often at a disadvantage in producing extended speech, as they have differing native (L1) phonological systems and rhetorical traditions or little experience in giving talks. Prosody in the form of stress, rhythm, and intonation is a difficult but crucial area needed to master extended speech because prosody…

In this essay, the author asserts that the dialogic pedagogy of Paulo Freire provides a good description of the dynamic of authentic learning. The author narrates one short example and one long example of Freirian dialogues occurring in a public high school, giving details that describe moments of transformation. The short narrative sketches…

The main purpose of this study was to analyze how effectively pair/group work writing activities in the currently in-use Grade 11 English textbook were structured or organized to promote CLL. To this end, the pair/group work writing activities were identified and analyzed based on the six basic elements of the CLL. Findings of the study show that…