"College readiness" has become a national buzzword in light of efforts to improve high school students' ability to successfully transition into postsecondary settings. One component of this transition that has long been an area of concern is students' readiness for college writing. Numerous stakeholders have weighed in on the question of…

Jim Carroll was concerned that A-level textbooks failed to provide his students with a model of the multi-voicedness that characterises written history. In order to show his students that historians constantly engage in argument as they write, Carroll turned to academic scholarship for models of multi-voiced history. Carroll explains here how he…

The author explores the tension between the social and cognitive definition of "argument" in the Common Core's theoretical rationale and the structural approach to argument reflected in the exemplars of student writing, evaluating the implications of these inconsistencies for the high school English classroom.

This study examines whether and how five novice history teachers incorporated writing into their instruction. We analyzed observations, student writing, teacher feedback and interviews, and classroom artifacts from teachers' preservice program experiences and first 2 years of teaching. All novices included writing in their instruction; however; we…

This Voices from the Field piece tells the story of a fortunate meeting on Twitter between a high school teacher and a college professor that blossomed into an exchange of KAHOOT! games and the recognition of shared pedagogical beliefs. KAHOOT! is a web-based platform that allows users to easily create and play interactive, multiple-choice-style…

This article considers text comprehension through the integrated perspectives of language processing research and practical writing advice as expressed in writing guides and language policies. Such guides for instance include advice to use active constructions instead of passives and sentences instead of nominalizations. These recommended and…

In writing classrooms, peer review has been shown to have numerous practical and cognitive benefits. However, little research has been done that examines how different types of peer feedback motivate adolescent students and the effects that different types of feedback have on writing quality. While the literature has indicated that peers give each…

Based on a larger ethnography (Li, 2017. Social Reproduction and Migrant Education: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Burmese Students' Learning Experiences at a Border High School in China. (PhD), Macquarie University. http://www.languageonthemove.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/LI_Jia_Social_reproduction_and_migrant_education.pdf) and…

There has been a dramatic increase in the number of multilingual and multicultural students in U.S. schools. Because of high-stakes testing and English-only mandates, instructional practices and curricula in most urban school districts neglect the cultural and linguistic interests of their diverse student populations. In this interpretive study,…

In this article, I share the ways in which New Literacies theory served as an interpretive lens to understand how the Internet as a cultural tool mediates the literacy actions of adolescents in English Language Arts classrooms. Data were drawn from a larger study in which students who were considered "at-risk" because of previous…

This study investigated and analyzed the use of rhetorical appeals, and the presence of hedges, and boosters in the argumentative essays of ESL learners. It is aimed at exploring the linguistic differences between male and female writers in terms of how they put forward their claims in an argument and how they appeal to their audience. The study…

This study investigated the conceptions about writing and writing self-efficacy beliefs held by high school students in relation to the students' gender as well as their associations with writing achievement. The results show that female students have more sophisticated writing conceptions than their male counterparts but no gender differences…

Dysgraphia, a specific learning disability, impairs legible and automatic letter production by hand, which can interfere with written composing. The goal of the current study was not to investigate effective methods for teaching self-regulated writing to students with dysgraphia, but rather to investigate their self that is involved in their…

Amplified by a global political climate of fear, oppression, and increased nationalism, this article examines how U.S. secondary students in a digital media elective course used multimodal composition, and video production in particular, as a nexus of 'participatory politics.' By partnering theories of multiliterate expression with youth civic…

This article shares what the author has learned as a high school English teacher and researcher from speaking with teachers and high school and college students over the past five years about what sort of feedback has been most helpful in students' development as writers. When examining the data and looking for overlapping themes in responses, six…