This study of the assets that international graduate students bring to the process of learning English academic writing in the US has two purposes. The primary purpose is to develop the Translingual Graduate Writers' Inventory of Strengths (TGWIS) and to test its reliability and validity as a tool to determine the particular strengths and…

Writing Studies has flourished as a field in Latin America during the last two decades. Its development has been fostered by an exponential growth of college enrollments and processes of expansion and democratization of the educational offer in the region. The renewed attention received by higher education writing has fueled new research efforts…

Despite its rich history in the English classroom, popular culture still does not have a strong foothold in first-year composition (FYC). Some stakeholders view popular culture as a "low-brow" topic of study (Bradbury, 2011), while others believe popular culture distracts students from learning about composition (Adler-Kassner, 2012).…

Although response scholarship has continually called for a greater emphasis on context when analyzing instructors' written commentary on student writing, textual analysis of written comments remains a primary direction for response research. Additionally, when context is accounted for, it is oftentimes done so in a rather reductive fashion, with a…

This exploratory case study was designed so that I could investigate the writing processes of sixth-grade students when composing traditional and digital compositions. With the increase in multimodal composing in classrooms, understanding how students compose and what traditional print text skills can be appropriated for digital composition is…

A single-subject, combined multiple-baseline-across-participants and ABC study was conducted to examine the functional relation between a traditional paper-based graphic organizer (PBGO) and a computer-based graphic organizer (CBGO) with technological enhancements (audio-prompting comments and text-to-speech) intervention and the improvements in…

This dissertation explores existing paraphrase pedagogies and the linguistic and rhetorical dimensions of expertly produced paraphrases in order to move both teachers and multilingual writers toward a balanced conception of acceptable academic paraphrase. Pedagogical treatments of paraphrase in a set of writing handbooks designed for students…

I conducted 2 experiments in which I tested the effects of a reader immersion procedure on the technical reading comprehension responses to print stimuli for 4 kindergarten students and 3 first grade students. The participants selected for this study textually responded to words at a rate of 80 words correct per minute with 0 incorrect words per…

Freshman composition instructors at Christian institutions face a disturbing predicament: competing pedagogies, administrative pressure to prove freshman composition's merit, public clamoring for greater return on the college investment, technology redefining what "writing" is, a postmodern audience, and most concerning, the challenge to…

This dissertation reports on how features of interactions and instruction contributed to an elementary classroom culture of reading and writing that students and their teacher worked together to develop. Positioning theory informed analysis of participants' interactions as they used texts in social and academic ways. The theory of figured worlds…

Writing is a critical proficiency for academic and career success, but a significant number of students enter higher education underprepared for the academic writing expectations awaiting them. Due to immense sociocultural barriers, linguistically-diverse college (LDC) students, in particular, may find college writing challenging. Complicated…

Although most of the writing in high school English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms is about literature and although there have been incessant calls for changing the practices of teaching and learning literature, only meager amounts of research have been conducted in these interrelated domains of the field. Accordingly, this dissertation seeks to…

This research study was designed and conducted to evaluate the regular education teacher's perspective on the effective use of Project Read to adequately instruct spelling mastery at the first grade level. The Project Read curriculum is divided into three major strands including phonics, reading comprehension, and written expression. Project…

Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs) have become like hospitals where there are multiple offices in centralized locations. One of the areas that need further study is how to integrate these services effectively and efficiently to service students. Healthcare has developed the triage model and IHEs are starting to bring this model into the…

In today's educational climate, in which preparing all K-12 students to succeed in college and career is paramount, a prominent concern is to ensure that students leave high school with "college level" writing skills. Notably, these discussions revolve around ensuring students are ready to "cross the threshold" between high…