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Purpose: This study draws on genre theory to analyze the linguistic and discursive presentation of the self in successful US college application essays. Research Methods: We used qualitative discourse analysis informed by the systemic functional linguistic concepts of field, tenor, and mode to analyze 20 sample application essays identified as exemplary by college admissions staff from 4 US colleges, along with essay-writing advice obtained from websites of 12 US universities. Our analysis aimed to specify (1) the characteristics of the self that are represented in successful essays and (2) how the writers linguistically and discursively construct these characteristics. Findings: Successful essays portrayed a unique and authentic self through distinctive, patterned features that spanned the three categories of field, tenor, and mode. Features related to "field" included extended metaphors representing insights gained from learning and experience, language representing niche interests, verbs suggesting learning or change, and appraisal language positioning the writer as charitable and optimistic; features related to "tenor" did not include direct address or questions but rather implicit persuasion through descriptive representation of the writer's character; and features related to "mode" included micronarratives, extended metaphors that supported cohesion, and syntactic structures that facilitated contrast of the writer's self before and after a significant moment of learning. Implications: As colleges move away from requiring standardized tests for admission, the importance of college application essays has increased. Our findings contribute to efforts to make successful performance of this high-stakes genre more attainable, particularly for first-generation and underrepresented students applying to college.

Though discipline-specific approaches to literacy instruction can support adolescents' academic literacy and identity development, scant attention has been paid to ways of targeting such instruction to address individual student needs. Dialogic writing assessment is an approach to conducting writing conferences that foregrounds students' composing process so that teachers can assess and support that process with instructional feedback. Because such feedback is immediate, teachers can observe how students take it up. While dialogic assessment has shown promise as an approach to revealing and supporting students' writing processes in English Language Arts classrooms, it remains to be explored how this approach can support developing writers in other subject areas. This paper offers an analytic narrative account of how a high school social studies teacher used this method to support the writing process of one student, exploring what the method revealed about the challenges the student faced in writing about history, the gaps and misconceptions in their understanding of history and the intersection between the two. We discuss how certain 'mediational moves' the teacher employed enabled the student to compose collaboratively with the teacher, and in this collaborative composing, to capture ideas that she later used in her independent writing.

Purpose: This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaboratively draw on and remix discourses and practices from multiple socially indexed traditions. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on data from a year-long social design experiment, this study uses qualitative coding and traces discoursal markers of indexicality. Findings: The youth sustained, remixed and evaluated interpretive communities in their navigation across disciplinary and fandom discourses to construct a hybrid classroom interpretive community. Originality/value: This research contributes to scholarship that supports using popular texts in classrooms as the focus of a scholarly inquiry by demonstrating how youth in one high school English classroom discursively index interpretive communities aligned with popular fandoms and literary scholarship. This study adds to understandings about the social nature of literary reading, interpretive whole-class text-based talk and literary literacies with multimodal texts in diverse, high school classrooms.

Purpose: This study aims to explore and provide empirical evidence for ways that teachers can simultaneously support students' literary reading and analytic writing through dialogic assessment, an approach to conferencing with writers that foregrounds process and integrates assessment and instruction. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses qualitative research methods of three high school teachers' dialogic assessment sessions with individual students to investigate how these teachers both assessed and taught literary reading moves as they observed and supported the students' writing. An expanded version of Rainey's (2017) scheme for coding literary reading practices was used. Findings: The three teachers varied in the range and extent of literary reading practices they taught and supported. The practices that they most commonly modeled or otherwise supported were making claims, seeking patterns and articulating puzzles. The variation we observed in their literary reading practices may be attributed to institutional characteristics of the teachers' contexts. Research limitations/implications: This study illustrates how the concept of prolepsis can be productively used as a lens through which to understand teachers' instructional choices. Practical implications: The descriptive findings show how individualized coaching of students' writing about literature can also support literary reading. Teachers of English need not worry that they have to choose between teaching writing and teaching reading. Originality/value: This study presents dialogic assessment as a useful way to guide students through the writing process and literary interpretation simultaneously.

With dialogic writing assessment, teachers can scaffold students' writing processes in ways that are flexible and responsive to students' individual needs. Examples of teachers using this conference-based method of classroom writing assessment illustrate how to practice assessment that is dynamic and relational rather than static and standardized, by allowing teachers to vary their support for student writers based on students' unique needs. These examples also suggest that teachers' epistemologies for writing instruction can influence how they practice dialogic writing assessment. The authors conclude with a discussion of how dynamic and responsive scaffolding can support an equity-focused model for teaching academic writing and how teachers' expertise may be a factor in how they apply dialogic writing assessment.

Teaching writing is hard, even for veteran writing teachers. We know how to structure writing conferences so that students engage with ideas, vocalize areas for improvement, and note next steps [...]

ABSTRACT In Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler (1993) wrote: “Any Change may bear seeds of benefit. Seek them out. Any Change may bear seeds of harm. Beware” (p. 116). In this paper, we apply this command to a speculative examination of the consequences of text‐based generative AI (GAI) for adolescent writers, framing this examination within a socially situated “Writers‐in‐Community” model of writing (Graham, 2018), which considers writing as both an act of individual cognition and as situated within concentric circles representing nested social, material, and cultural contexts for writing. Through the lens of this model, we discuss representations of language‐related technologies in works by several well‐known authors of 20th‐century speculative fiction and contrast these speculative scenarios with examples from our recent research into student writers' use of ChatGPT and other GAI tools. Finally, we discuss (a) the limitations of these tools as lacking the ability to set goals and use these goals to compose a written work, which is a key component of an effective writing process and (b) what would be required to supporting students to write agentively in collaboration with these tools, despite these limitations. This discussion focuses on three principles: (1) centering human writers in collaborations with GAI; (2) setting writer goals to address historical, political, institutional, and social influences; and (3) critical agency in literacy with GAI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educators and researchers are interested in ways that ChatGPT and other generative AI tools might move beyond the role of “cheatbot” and become part of the network of resources students use for writing. We studied how high school students used ChatGPT as a writing support while writing arguments about topics like school mascots. We asked: What did students prompt ChatGPT to do? And how did students take up ChatGPT's responses to those prompts? We used Flower and Hayes' writing model to analyze screencasts of students interacting with ChatGPT and one another as they planned, drafted, and reviewed their arguments. Our data show that while planning and drafting, students primarily asked ChatGPT for ideas and then built upon those ideas to develop their own arguments. While reviewing, they generally used ChatGPT as they might use Grammarly or other editing tools. Students also compared their writing with that of ChatGPT, which allowed them to identify their unique writing voices and build meta‐level understandings of rhetorical choices and effects. Our study indicates that ChatGPT can become a part of a social, distributed model of writing, and that students can use ChatGPT as a resource for writing without sidestepping the processes of planning, drafting, and reviewing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 and challenges as writers from the students' performance on a think-aloud-protocol (TAP) Assessment, how this information differed from what they knew about the students as writers based only on their previous writing in class, and what ideas this new TAP-generated information gave them for instruction. We found that the TAP Assessment was especially useful in generating new information related to audience awareness, interpretation of the task, and self-evaluation. Teachers also offered creative suggestions for adapting the TAP Assessment for further use in their classrooms.

Despite the high stakes attached to students' performance on assessments of academic writing, we still know little about the challenges students face when composing in academic contexts. To begin to address this problem, two studies were designed with the following aims: to identify and describe the most prevalent types of academic writing at the secondary level, and to characterize the challenges that both English Language Learners (ELLs) and non-English-Language Learners (non-ELLs) experience with this type of writing. Findings from these studies reveal that (1) in the context of New York City schools, exposition/argument is the most prevalent genre assigned as a writing task in secondary classrooms, as well as the most valued; and that (2) while both Intermediate ELLs and non-ELLs articulated "Translating" (the process of articulating ideas in the conventions of written English) as the most frequent challenge, the two groups differed in the kinds of "Translating" challenges and in the types and range of other challenges they articulated: ELLs articulated fewer challenges specifically related to the genre of exposition than did non-ELLs. Based on these findings we suggest several new approaches to classroom diagnostic assessment of writing, and raise issues to be considered in these approaches. (Contains 7 tables.)

As a topic of concern to educational researchers, writing is enjoying something of a renaissance, particularly with respect to the transition between secondary and post-secondary levels of schooling. In the context of this renewed interest, this article presents a framework for understanding composition that integrates cognitive, textual and social dimensions. I explore how each of these three dimensions contributes to our understanding of the challenges that student writers face when composing. I also discuss ways in which the increasingly social focus of much research on composition offers new ways of thinking about the cognitive and textual dimensions. Finally, I propose that integrating these dimensions in our study and teaching of composition can help us to better understand and address the challenges that students face in moving across educational contexts. (Contains 1 note.)

Finding a way to integrate authentic learning experiences and explicit instruction is essential if teachers are to adapt to the current policy environment while at the same time acknowledging the rights of students to determine their own goals for literacy learning. Toward this end, the author presents a case study of one student's development as a writer in the context of an English classroom in which both curriculum and instruction were strongly influenced by a districtwide context of standards-based reform and the accompanying pressure surrounding high-stakes testing. Sheila, the African American student who is the subject of this study, challenged the values that underlay her teacher's expectations for observing the conventions of Standard English in her writing and, in doing so, contributed to a compelling illustration of the limits of explicitness in the teaching of writing. It has been argued that when students have a chance to declare "who they are, what they know, and that they care about" (Oldfather & Dahl, 1994, p. 144) in their literacy activities, and when they "perceive a sense of competence as literate persons--as readers and writers who use tools of literacy for their learning goals" (p. 144), they are more likely to be motivated to take an active stand as agents in the pursuit of their own literacy learning. Interviews with Sheila about her essays offer insight into the sources of motivation that inspired her to develop complex analytical ideas in her essays, even as she maintained her stance on the seeming irrelevance of Standard English as a criterion for a high-quality paper. Drawing on these interviews and samples of her writing, along with teacher interviews and field notes from observations of her English class, the author discusses both her resistance to and her enthusiasm for certain aspects of the writing tasks her teacher set for her, highlighting the significance of points at which the teacher's instruction intersected with her goals and where it did not. A larger aim of this paper is to urge teacher educators, and the teacher-candidates whom they are charged with educating, to consider the nature of authenticity in tasks and contexts for writing development against the present backdrop of standards-based reform and high-stakes testing.

Genre-based approaches to teaching writing have made important strides in heightening students' awareness of audience and purpose but have paid less attention to the ways in which expectations for written performance in school context are embedded in expectations for certain kinds of discipline-based thinking. In this paper we present a study that explored how a group of high school students studying history and literature within an interdisciplinary framework experience the thinking demands associated with a particular kind of writing characteristic of both subjects: analytic exposition. We found that the task of articulating interpretive thematic statements is a significant challenge for these students, in some cases because the nature of interpretative understanding remains elusive to them and in others because they struggle with finding the language to express this understanding in a concise form. A separate but related finding has to do with opportunities for interpretive insight that arose from writing in genres other than conventional analytic exposition, for example, narrative, descriptive, and imaginative writing. We conclude our discussion by recommending further investigation of ways in which alternatives to analytic exposition may be used as bridges to mastery of this important academic genre. (Contains 4 footnotes and 3 tables.)

High-stakes writing assessments currently exert a strong influence on the writing curriculum and instruction in schools across the United States. Under these circumstances it is important to examine the construct of writing competence on which these assessments are based, as well as the extent to which this construct supports the goals of secondary education. In this paper we conduct an exploratory analysis of the genre demands of high-stakes writing assessments from three states - California, Texas, and New York - with the aim of discerning, comparing, and evaluating the role that genre knowledge plays in the construct of writing competence measured by these assessments. Our method of inquiry includes both task analysis of the prompts and genre analysis of high-scoring benchmark papers written in response to these prompts. For the analysis of benchmark papers we employed both structural analysis and quantitative counts of key linguistic features to characterize the genres represented in these assessment tasks. Our results suggest a lack of alignment between the genres of the benchmark papers designated as exemplary and the genre demands of the prompts to which they were written. Exceptions to this pattern were most common on the New York assessments, which contextualize writing tasks in tests of subject-matter knowledge. Findings from our exploratory analysis lead us to argue for greater consistency and clarity of expectations in the design of high-stakes writing exams, and for the design of writing tasks that adequately represent the demands of discipline-specific forms of written discourse. (Contains 4 tables.)

This article employs the concept of intersubjectivity to analyze developments in and discrepancies between students' understandings of criteria for effective writing and the criteria of their teacher. It reports on a study that employed qualitative methods of interview and classroom observation in conjunction with analysis of students' writing and the teacher's feedback on their writing to explore the struggles of students learning the "genre of power" (Lemke, 1988, p. 89) of the literary analysis essay. The greatest challenges for the students in this study occurred for those whose goals and expectations related to this high-stakes genre of writing were not based on the same taken-for-granted assumptions about context and purpose as were their teacher's. The article concludes by discussing teachers' professional responsibility to negotiate shared goals for literacy with their students. (Contains 4 tables, 2 figures and 4 notes.)