The employment of genre-based pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching in second language education is representative of a paradigmatic shift towards a focus on meaning-making. Despite this shift, second language acquisition (SLA) research continues to predominantly rely on complexity, accuracy, and fluency metrics to assess learner production…

Expert readers' responses to texts offer specific, meaningful insights useful in building English language arts models (ELA) for student writers. In the case of academic peer review, previous research has demonstrated that expert reviewers have specific expectations involving readers, texts, and processes. Identifying congruence between research…

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Practice Guide, "Teaching Secondary Students to Write Effectively," offers educators three specific, evidence-based recommendations that address the challenges of teaching students in grades 6-12 to write effectively. This summary focuses on the first of the three recommendations: Explicitly teach…

This study aims to examine qualitatively a new approach to teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) writing based on the learner's context model. It investigates the context model-based approach in class and identifies key characteristics of the approach delivered through a four-phase teaching and learning cycle. The model collects research…

Service-learning projects and traditional internships both prepare the student of technical communication for the workforce in many ways. What is lacking in the scholarship is a discussion of how to successfully link these two ideas. To help teachers implement courses that bridge the gap between service-learning projects and internships, I discuss…

Details writing problems technical students encounter when they fail to distinguish between model and example and between different kinds of models. Analyzes these problems with reference to inappropriate material in texts. Defines several writing models, and shows how understanding these models gives writers rhetorical flexibility while producing…

Suggests a method for modeling the characters of readers and writers as they are shaped in the process of writing about public policy issues. Uses this model to examine classroom oral presentations of four professionals. Integrates consideration of writing process, audience, ethics, and public policy issues. (HB)

Departmental lines can interfere with collaboration among academic colleagues. Working together within the same department, a speech teacher and a writing teacher realized that both speech and writing have preparatory (planning and development), performance, and evaluation stages, and that within the various stages students use the same or similar…

Reports on a case study of a technique designed to increase adult English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students' communicative competence by exposing students to real audiences in authentic settings. In the approach, students learn the subtle influence of cultural and social factors of speech in a manner difficult to duplicate in a classroom. (four…