As writing instructors, the authors spend hours "talking back" to their students through written comments on their drafts. But how do student writers receive their comments, and what do they "do" with this feedback? Teachers invest so much time and energy in their responses to papers. How do they know what gets through, what makes sense to their…

Among the four skills in English teaching and learning, writing has a rather limited portion in high school classes. Requiring several steps, writing has been given less time than what it actually deserves. As a result, it takes a longer period of time for the student to submit their writing products. What we often forget is that the process of…

Students often express surprise at their grades on papers. This gap between expectation and achievement may stem in part from lack of facility with revision strategies. How, then, can teachers work with their students to foster more effective revisions? This question in teaching and learning has inspired an interdisciplinary collaboration: one of…

Focusing on the creative writing of Year 6 boys as they make the transition to Year 7, this article establishes a theoretical model for creative writing as response. In line with Bakhtin's notion of utterances as 'interpersonal' (1986), the model demonstrates the complexity of creative writing -- the text is influencing of and influenced by an…

Today, when the author reads articles or hears discussions about teaching grammar, she finds interesting dichotomies in perspectives. Some people see language issues as right or wrong: That's it. No flexibility. This perspective is evident when people look at issues of language in stark contrasts instead of in relation to context. Another…

This paper explores the potential of sketchbooks as a pathway for developing ideas for writing in high school English classrooms. This paper examines how shifting between drawing and writing impacts students' ability to develop ideas for writing and create meaningful texts. Specifically, this paper explores four types of visual sign making that…

This article addresses two central research questions: (1) Are there possible detrimental implications to teaching multimodal composition in first-year composition? (2) If so, what is pedagogy's role in mediating these outcomes? Guided by these questions and focused on the responses of eighty seven first-year composition students, a mixed-methods…

It is imperative that in conversations about literacy instruction teachers incorporate curriculum dedicated to youth empowerment, especially for emergent bilingual and LGBTQ youth, as recognizing and honoring students' linguistic and epistemic privileges entails taking their claims about the world seriously. In this article, the author discusses…

The place of grammar within the teaching of writing has long been contested and successive research studies have indicated no correlation between grammar teaching and writing attainment. However, a recent study has shown a significant positive impact on writing outcomes when the grammar input is intrinsically linked to the demands of the writing…

Identifying English Education courses focused on young adult literature as apposite sites for exploring teacher conceptions of youth and the texts aimed for youths' consumptions, this article addresses the multiple sources of tension--and pedagogical potential--of teaching a young adult literature course centrally framed around controversial…

While reading a series of undergraduate essay drafts, ten newly appointed graduate teaching assistants consistently projected their own anxieties about academic writing onto the authors of the papers, with two exceptions: the students were imagined neither to have the teachers' compositional agency nor to feel their ambivalence about the academic…

This paper investigated a number of common ungrammatical patterns that were found in Chinese EFL leaners' free writings, in order to find useful pedagogical implications for English grammar teaching in EFL setting, especially in China. The corpus of writing data is examined by the author together with a native English teacher. Our findings suggest…

Writing, as an advanced model of output, not only conveys the subject but also realizes the communication between readers and writers. Metadiscourse can help writers arrange and organize the discourse to influence readers' understanding of the text and their attitude towards its content. Taking writing samples of College English Test Band 4…

This multiple case study investigates the learning processes of postsecondary English literature graduates who teach composition to diverse student groups. Since the context of study in English literature graduate programs concentrates on literature and literary theory, the interest of this study examines how teachers learn to teach composition…

To define ethics as a mode of inquiry, it is first important to consider how ethics relates to critical thinking. Put simply, ethical inquiry is one type of inquiry required to think critically. A connection between critical thinking and ethics is only possible, however, when ethics is defined not as a static list of rules but as a "mode of…