This study explored the letter-writing practices of incarcerated adult students at a facility within the Los Angeles County jail system. The study sought to understand the role that letter writing plays in the lives of these individuals, their unique composition processes and products, their beliefs about themselves and their skills as writers,…

This study considers how English educators can catalyze learning within secondary English education programs to help preservice teachers define and re-examine what counts as writing in the 21st century, and to apply this knowledge in their future school contexts. In it, I explore how preservice teachers develop, articulate, and enact conceptual…

A study was conducted to determine the extent to which high school and college/university Advanced Placement English Language and Composition readers value and implement the curricular requirements of Advanced Placement English Language and Composition. The participants were 158 readers of the 2010 Advanced Placement English Language and…

This dissertation reports case studies from in-depth phenomenological interviewing of six individual female university students. The purpose of this dissertation was to describe the influence that literature experiences have had on the identity formation of said participant informants through recursive analysis of their interviews, observing how…

This paper addresses my experience with a group of 11th grade students and their reading of The Grapes of Wrath (1939, 2002) by John Steinbeck. I questioned how the application of visual arts integration strategies, specifically the use of spontaneously created paintings, might influence the reader responses of my high school junior-level…

Recitations and discussions are two types of interactions which have long been of interest to researchers who study classroom discourse in secondary English and Social Studies. According to research, teachers control the discourse during recitations through "inauthentic" questions requiring pre-specified answers. In contrast, discussions involve…