Writing researchers have long sought to make tacit writing knowledge explicit, rendering it available for learning and critique. We advance this endeavor by describing our use of the "tool-based interview" (TBI) as a variation of Odell, Goswami, and Herrington's influential discourse-based interview (DBI). Rather than the product-focused…

Writing a thesis is often an obstacle for final semester students. A myriad of problems become the reason for every student for not being on time to complete a thesis. This study aims to determine the contribution of mini research projects in supporting thesis writing and the usefulness of mini research projects. This action research was carried…

This article follows the academic literacy learning trajectory of Farah, an undergraduate anthropology major at the American University in Cairo. In charting her path from the Egyptian public schooling system to a Western-based transnational university, this study offers a perspective in which a writer created and navigated a challenging…

This article studies the growing and changing cultural identifications of one early adolescent Mexican American girl as represented by her engagements with literacy. Her writing behaviors in particular manifested a changing cultural identity that reacted to and represented her response to a changing world. Her bilingualism and biculturalism…

Factual writing is a key macrogenre of American K-12 schooling that is also valued in workplace and society. This study examined the genre and register features of two subgenres of factual writing--biography and report--composed by 48 sixth-grade students in a curriculum unit on scientists and science-related careers aimed at developing students'…

Although much is written about academic writing, very little is known about what is good academic writing in the eyes of student-teachers, challenges involved in academic writing, and pedagogical needs. To fill this literature gap, this article provides a brief overview of Bhutanese student-teachers' perspective on good academic writing,…

The rapid evolution of virtual reality (VR) technologies and their adoption for learning opens up new possibilities for shifting semiotic content across modes, with underexplored scope for transmediating content in visual, haptic, and auditory ways in immersive media literacy practices. This research investigated users' creative digital designing…

Learning objectives (LOs) are used to communicate the purpose of instruction. Done well, they convey the expectations that the instructor--and by extension, the academic field--has in terms of what students should know and be able to do after completing a course of study. As a result, they help students better understand course activities and…

The purpose of this paper is to explore how three world history teachers, despite their stated rationales, nevertheless addressed and reinforced notions of citizenship in their classrooms, both implicitly and explicitly. In doing so, Erin A. Bronstein addresses the following questions: (1) How do the research participants talk about their beliefs…

This study sought to examine the pre-task planning and post-task revising practices of adults with low literacy and how those practices affect overall writing quality. Seventy-six adults with low literacy composed essays in response to a prompt and were given time for pre-task planning and post-task revising. Results showed that participants with…

This article examines how scientists, classroom teachers, poetry educators, and youth negotiated the domains of science through their engagement in a two-year Massive Open Online Collaboration (MOOC) funded by the National Science Foundation. To make sense of learners' unconventional and interdisciplinary writing and the cultural and disciplinary…

While research on sound and education has opened up important pathways, it dominantly approaches sound as meaningful. This paper charts another tendency, exploring sound as educational precisely because it resists our attempts at understanding. The force that guides this trajectory is that of timbre, or the nuance of sounds. I begin with…

Background: This exploratory writing analytics study uses argumentative writing samples from two performance contexts--standardized writing assessments and university English course writing assignments--to compare: (1) linguistic features in argumentative writing; and (2) relationships between linguistic characteristics and academic performance…

Due to the advances of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing, new kinds of Internet-based writing tools have emerged. Among other things, these AI-powered writing tools can be used by students for text translation, to improve spelling or for rewriting and summarizing texts. On the one hand, they can provide detailed…

For this qualitative study, I employed performance gap analysis and root cause analysis on a university via semi-structured interviews that included member checking follow-ups with 10 university stakeholders and three focus groups to: (1) identify the performance gap; (2) hone in on the performance gap and identify the root causes; and (3)…