Thus far, pedagogical discussions about comics in the college classroom have focused primarily on "reading," with less attention paid to the complementary potential of "composing" comics. This essay advocates using narrative theory alongside comic studies to provide students and teachers with a flexible, transferable vocabulary…

Written corrective feedback has been subject to increasing attention in recent years, in part because of the conceptual controversy surrounding it and in part because of its ubiquitous practice. This study takes a meta-analytic approach to synthesizing extant empirical research, including 21 primary studies. Guiding the analysis are two questions:…

The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) is the largest nationally representative assessment of what the nation's students know and can do in subjects such as mathematics, reading, science, and writing. The results of NAEP are released as The Nation's Report Card. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), within the U.S.…

English learners have more access to communicate with different purposeful audiences across the Three Concentric Circles of English (Kachu, 1985): the Inner Circle, the Outer Circle and the Expanding Circle. However, young language learners' purposeful audience as a focus of communication has not been emphasized as much as other linguistic…

The importance of collocations, i.e. idiosyncratic binary word co-occurrences in the context of second language learning has been repeatedly emphasized by scholars working in the field. Some went even so far as to argue that "vocabulary learning is collocation learning" (Hausmann, 1984, p. 395). Empirical studies confirm this…

This article connects the pedagogy of the multimajor professional writing (MMPW) course with two important contemporary discussions in composition studies: the pedagogy called writing about writing (WAW) and the conversation about the transferability of rhetorical knowledge from school to work. We argue that the capaciousness of the WAW approach…

This research aimed to explore the relation between syntactic awareness and writing composition in 129 Hong Kong Chinese children. These children were from a ten-year longitudinal project. At each year, a number of measures were administered. The 129 children's data of nonverbal reasoning at age 4, phonological awareness, morphological awareness,…

This article examines two course redesigns undertaken to improve student support, learning, and retention in the basic writing program at Oakland University, a doctoral research university in southeast Michigan, where support for developmental writers has fluctuated dramatically between nurture and neglect over the past fifty years. However,…

This article describes a two-semester study of mixed (native and non-native speaking) writing groups in developmental college writing classes. The teacher assigned and observed writing activities and collected survey and interview data to determine the impact on the students' perceived writing abilities and attitudes toward paired and small group…

Formative assessment strategies are used to direct instruction by establishing where learners' understanding is, how it is developing, informing teachers and students alike as to how they might get to their next set of goals of conceptual understanding. For the science classroom, one rich source of formative assessment data about scientific…

The following commentary presents an overview of earlier studies of discourse functions and syntactic complexity as well as recent investigations that focus on interaction and measures of syntactic and lexical complexity in learners' output in traditional classrooms and computer-mediated environments. Recent studies emphasize the need for better…

In this article, we examined whether career writing--creative, expressive, and reflective writing--can increase luck readiness, which is the ability to respond and make use of (career) opportunities. Two 2-day writing courses were taught to third-year bachelor students, one before and one after work placements. In this exploratory study, results…

This article presents the language practices of global youth who populate an online discussion forum devoted to Korea-produced dramas. Qualitative data included the writing, visual images, and interactions created within the forum. Findings revealed youth from geographically disparate places using new media affordances to engage with a minority…

An essay's motive or research problem consists of the rhetorical moves illuminating why that essay matters--what puzzling elements of a primary source it resolves, which contradictions in the data it explains, or what gaps in the literature it fills. This article invites college instructors to dedicate some of their classroom time to teaching…

Since 1997, the Great Lakes Academy has provided leadership development for more than 800 teachers in a large metropolitan region of the Upper Midwest. Graduates of the 2-year program often describe their experience as transformative, life changing, and profound. To understand the meaning and impact of this transformation, the author used…