This case study conducted by a writing specialist and a theatre specialist examines the ways in which writing to learn and learning to write took form in a course in which the ultimate goal was a staged production for a live audience. Using naturalistic methodology that deployed both ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches to analyze the…

This essay explores what the development of writing might look like and how it might take shape in a secondary English classroom. The study problematises current definitions of progress. In direct opposition to standards-driven models, I propose an alternative way of thinking about the development of writers through a series of narrative accounts…

This paper reports on a classroom-based inquiry using quantitative methods conducted with Japanese EFL students' writing practice using ETS's Criterion. The purpose of the study is to examine the actual effects of teachers' feedback on students' writing on Criterion. Twelve university students in Japan participated in this study, while completing…

In this profile we describe changes to the composition program at Missouri University of Science and Technology, prompted by the hiring of the university's first writing program administrator (WPA). We describe our efforts to implement evidence-based best practices in undergraduate writing courses in a context where very little program specific…

This study reports the types of spelling errors made by the beginner learners of English in the EFL context as well as the major sources underpinning such errors in contextual writing composition tasks. Data were collected from written samples of 122 EFL students (male and female) enrolled in the intensive English language programme during the…

In recent years, a number of studies have attempted to assess the English vocabulary knowledge of high-school students and undergraduate university students in contexts where English is a foreign language (EFL). The present paper explores the lexical development of Arab undergraduates at a Saudi University where EFL is the medium of instruction.…

The purpose of this study was to explore relationships between language variables and writing outcomes with linguistically diverse students in grades 3-5. The participants were 197 children from three schools in one district in the mid-Atlantic United States. We assessed students' vocabulary knowledge and morphological and syntactical skill as…

This article explores how short form/comedic improvisational theater impacts the development of writing fluency. Students in all disciplines need to be able to purposefully write, however by the time students reach high school many have already given up trying to express even their own thoughts in free writing. Two quasi-experimental action…

The advent of Web 2.0 has fostered the emergence of a new collaborative culture shared by internet users worldwide in which the notions of intertextuality and hypertext have evolved, resulting in the reconsideration of authors and their role in text production. It is becoming increasingly common to access, reinterpret and modify contents and texts…

In 2011, Arum and Roksa challenged the higher education community to examine its practices and improve its performance in Academically Adrift. While recognizing the near universal accessibility achieved by American colleges and universities, the study suggested that students are not learning as well as they should. They measured academic rigor by…

This article situates one possible future for rhetorical genre studies (RGS) in the translingual, multimodal composing practices of linguistically diverse composition students. Using focus group data collected with L1 (English as a first language) and L2 (English as a second language) students at two large public state universities, the researcher…

While the vast majority of scholarship on mobile media, social semiotics, and multimodality highlights work done "behind" the screen, few studies have considered the embodied processes of youth composing "with" and "through" mobile technology. This study, drawn from a larger critical qualitative connective…

This study examined the discourse skills of deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children by comparing their oral and written narratives produced for the wordless picture book, "Frog, Where Are You?" (Mayer, 1969), with those of school-age-matched hearing peers. The written stories produced by 42 Italian 7- to 15-year-old children with…

Many college students abandon their goal of completing a degree in science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) when confronted with challenging introductory-level science courses. In the U.S., this trend is more pronounced for underrepresented minority (URM) and first-generation (FG) students, and contributes to persisting racial and…

As the move to increase availability of composition courses in the online environment continues, it is important to understand the ways in which composition instructors take on the challenges associated with moving their teaching online and how they modify, or re-mediate, their pedagogy for this new teaching and learning environment. By…