With increasing changes in our demographic populations and new immigrants settling in the US, there is an increasing need for visual communications that address the diversity of our populations. This paper draws from the results of the researcher's several past research and teaching projects that worked with different cultural populations. These…

In the present study I examine meaning-making as an integral aspect of successful writing assignments in political science. Results of a semester-long quasi-experimental pilot study show that meaning-making writing tasks help students in Introduction to American Politics courses become more politically engaged through the inculcation of civic…

This article reports partial results of a qualitative study which explored the gains and challenges encountered by two groups of English as a foreign language pre-service teachers from a public university in Medellin, Colombia, in developing a situated view of academic writing through a systemic functional genre-based instructional unit. The unit…

How to make research relevant to policymakers is an enduring question in academe. Building upon the experience of the authors, this article examines the issue of research relevance to policymakers and provides suggestions for researchers interested in connecting their research to policy at the institutional, state, and federal levels.

One of the problematic features of the "skills discourse" is the view that skills are decontextualized bits of knowledge and disposition. Instead, how skills such as communication are defined and used are shaped by cultural, political, and situational factors. In this article, we integrate theory from communication studies, critical…

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of two comprehensive argumentative writing interventions--Text Structure Instruction (TSI) and Text Structure Revision Instruction (TSRI)--on the eighth-grade students' ability to compose convincing essays that include structural elements of argumentative discourse. Both treatment groups…

It is a heated discussion among researchers of foreign-language teaching on how to enhance the audience awareness through the design, organization and implementation of classroom teaching of EFL writing, which is crucial for effective writing both in mother and in foreign language. And it is widely acknowledged that the cultivation of social…

The facts bear out that the odds are against most scientific researchers and scholars--especially those just starting out--in their attempts to win funding for their research projects through their grant proposals. In this article, the author takes a close look at some of the proposal-related problems and pitfalls that have historically challenged…

Teaching about climate science presents some unique challenges. Unlike many other science topics, mitigation and adaptation to climate change will require students to take action. This article outlines five major challenges to communicating about climate change in the classroom, drawing on research in environmental psychology: scepticism,…

In this article, we explore how teachers who make their work public through talk and texts may find their composing complicated by issues of authority. These public composing acts include drafting articles, preparing workshop presentations, authoring op-ed pieces and letters to the editor, developing book manuscripts--creating any of the spoken…

This study explored how an audience-focused writing curriculum mediated the literacy development of bilingual Latina/o first-grade students. Drawing on translingual theories of literacy and scholarship describing the role of audience and audience awareness in skilled writing, this study qualitatively documented and analyzed students' writing and…

This article investigates the strategies web-writers develop when their audiences respond to them via textual participation. Focusing on three web-writers who want to "continue the conversation," this article identifies five major strategies to accomplish this aim: (a) editing after production, (b) quotation, (c) question posing, (d)…

Open textbook initiatives have appeared as an alternative to traditional publishing. These initiatives for the production of alternatively copyrighted educational resources provide a way of sharing materials through the Web. While the open model of peer-produced materials enables the global reuse of textbooks, the combination of fragments to…

In order to teach writing effectively, teachers need assessment tools that work for diagnostic purposes--tools that can help them identify students' specific strengths and challenges with writing, as well as generate new ideas for instruction. This study explored what 5 high school teachers (3 ELA and 2 ESL) learned about their students' strengths…

This article reports on a case study, using a think-aloud approach (Boren & Ramey, 2000; Jaspers, Steen, van den Bos & Geenen, 2004; Kilsdonk et al., 2016), to investigate how different types of audiences interpret ePortfolios. During recorded viewing, students, instructors, and business professionals narrated their experience of reading…