This dissertation has a couple of purposes: (1) to examine what writing knowledge and digital experiences are transferred/fail to be transferred to digital writing in a first-year writing class, and (2) to explore how writing knowledge, digital literacy, and students' prior writing experiences impact students' transfer between different activity…

The research presented here is a qualitative heuristic inquiry, sparked and driven by the following research question: How do first-year elementary teachers experience coping with strain? This inquiry investigated the experiences of six first-year elementary school teachers coping with strain working in a southwestern state of the United States.…

A growing body of academic writing literature has been devoted to studying the rhetorical patterns and language use in diverse academic texts. One of the central goals of these studies is to demystify these texts to acquaint writers, particularly less experienced ones, with the genre conventions. However, Teaching Philosophy Statements (TPS) as a…

Multilingual learners (MLs) bring numerous resources to science learning contexts. In classrooms, multilingual learners have expansive linguistic repertoires to draw upon for information-seeking (Gynne & Bagga-Gupta, 2015), collaboration (French, 2016; Garcia & Sylvan, 2011), and learning (Vygotsky, 1978). However, within US secondary…

Writing is an essential life skill. It is a critical area of literacy instruction and high-stakes assessments. However, emphasis on writing instruction and assessment has not correlated with widespread writing proficiency. Within this context, teachers experience the phenomenon of writing instructional leadership. Teachers' preparation as writers…

The first part of this dissertation conducts a large-scale study comparing general and usage-based indices of syntactic complexity in L2 Mandarin writing samples across a wide range of proficiency levels. To do this, the Tool for the Automated Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity (TAASSC; Kyle, 2016) was adapted for Mandarin by…

To guide antiracist curriculum reform in higher education and better support college writers from racially marginalized and traditionally underserved backgrounds, this dissertation emerged from a five-year ethnographic study of a slam and spoken-word poetry program housed in a DEI office at a large research university. Merging feminist…

This study aimed to apply the novel use of a conceptual interview and flowchart to support teachers in easily identifying areas of development in writing using the developmental/cognitive model of writing (Flower & Hayes, 1980). This study involved two phases. The first phase involved the creation of a conceptual interview and flowchart based…

Trauma studies in education (Dutro & Bien, 2015) emphasize that while teachers and students may experience acute traumatic events, they are also subjected to the ongoing trauma of institutional spaces that attempt to bracket the emotional from the cognitive. This study engages novice teachers in critical writing pedagogy to examine what…

The goal of this qualitative single case study was to explore the effects of expressive writing as a self-regulation strategy in a suburban high school algebra classroom for reducing self-reported math anxiety. A variety of stressors related to the school environment impact adolescents, including peer dynamics, stress from the high school…

Underpinned by positioning theory as both a theoretical lens and methodological tool, this paper asserts that educators can improvise asset-based discourse to create spaces for student writers to exercise agency. This single-case study, focusing on four education undergraduates situated as both writers and writing mentors in a literacy course and…

My dissertation is structured as follows: introduction, background, methods, findings in the form of a PowerPoint presentation designed for teachers at my school and "Reading Teacher" article, and implications. Introduction: In response to my students underperforming in language arts I developed my research question; How can I use…

Disarticulating conceptions of writers and good writing from the academy and elevating conceptions of writers as reflecting communities, as intellectuals with important ideas and images to share no matter their academic pedigree is of paramount importance to developing a sense of writerly self-efficacy, or "students' self-perceptions of their…

Since Swain's (1985) Output Hypothesis, producing output in second language (L2) has been assumed to be a crucial cognitive process that promotes L2 acquisition, by actively facilitating various cognitive processes (e.g., noticing, hypothesis testing, conscious reflections of own language use, and automatization of the linguistic knowledge) (de…

This research seeks to better understand the attitudes and dispositions of advanced-level English Language Arts students toward the activities of academic research and writing, and to explore the ways that critical pedagogies focused on authentic inquiry and composition interact with these attitudes. The project draws upon research in student…