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Recent advocates of postcritique urge scholars not to read texts suspiciously but instead to regard texts as capable of saying what they mean and, accordingly, to take those meanings seriously. While a suspicious disposition underlies much of introductory composition pedagogy, especially the teaching of argument, postcritique has made little entry into discourses of undergraduate instruction. Attending to the New Sincerity movement in American literature, film, and music after 1980, this essay examines how teaching texts that emphasize their own sincerity (and the difficulty of achieving sincere expression) can encourage students to regard argument and interpretation not as suspicious practices but as means for a generous mode of description that does not sacrifice the complexity of a given text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Portfolios are considered as an alternative assessment in EFL composition. The use of portfolios as an assessment tool is linked to the process-based approach to writing. Many researchers have examined the integration of portfolios and how beneficial they can be in assessing student writing. Rather than just an assessment tool, portfolios represent the process of creating drafts which ensure a continuous relationship between the teacher and the student. Drafting students’ written assignments offers teachers the ability to follow student’s progress by focusing on an alternative approach to teaching and assessing writing. Furthermore, the incorporation of drafts gives the opportunity to students to become aware of their weaknesses and problems in writing while at the same time taking action into improving these issues based on the teacher feedback. Responding to student writing is an important issue to discuss when considering teaching composition to EFL students. It should not be misunderstood and taken as the same notion as evaluation. Response is a process that includes peer review, peer editing and continuous feedback through the stages of writing. Teacher feedback, which is genuine, effective, and long-lasting has proven to be efficient for both teachers and students. By giving constructive feedback, the teacher understands students’ problems and intentions by also making them responsible for finding and analyzing what needs to be improved. Moreover, constructive feedback given in the form of a comment and directed to each student individually influences the students’ motivation and self-confidence when it comes to expressing themselves in writing. This study, following the process-based instruction, examines the effectiveness of drafts and the impact of constructive feedback on the overall students’ performance in EFL composition. Portfolios are used as the qualitative method for evaluating students’ outcomes after undergoing drafting and alternative feedback types as opposed to being given a grade on a written assignment that is not offered a follow up for improvements. The findings support the hypothesis that EFL composition can be influenced through the use of drafts and enhanced by the incorporation of constructive feedback which would continuously ensure an upgrade and result in a final improved written product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting a queer pedagogy in composition classes that include diverse student populations can play an important role in promoting conversations on diversity and equity in the classroom. Under this approach, teachers and students are invited to question the connections between language, the body, power, and ethnicity, thus analysing how our language practices denote unique perceptions of the world. In this article, we intend to connect queer composition theory and pedagogies to a research experience to account for how teachers and students construct embodied and meaningful interactions in the composition class when they explore alternative queer forms of thinking and writing. To accomplish this goal, we foreground the work of queer composition scholars who question how our everyday language and writing practices shape our perception of other individuals and challenge us to consider how we mutually care for and respect each other's language practices and raced bodies within our pedagogies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from data generated in a third-grade classroom in the months following the 2016 US presidential election, this article zooms in on self-produced videos a child made of her writing process. Organized around 3 "takes" of the child's writing, the author provides readers a glimpse into (1) the child's composing in the videos, (2) a narrative retelling of the author's viewing of the video series, and (3) a list of insights for educational researchers and practitioners to "take" away from the child's writing. In closing, the author extends an invitation for readers to consider, how if at all, the child's texts might be considered (digital) writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the everyday lives of young people happens on social media, mainly those image-centric platforms, like Instagram. Participation in these platforms has increased practices of meaning-making associated with vernacular literacies. Digital production on Instagram articulates traditions from vernacular writing and photography and is characterized by the mass-circulation, hybridized genres and texts, and the centrality of the image. In this article, I examine the role of image as a precursor of meaning and writing on social media, and the functions and patterns of production present in the practices of 2 Chilean young people. The functions of documentary and testimony; self-expression and identity; sociality, audience, and participation are interwoven with each other and with the patterns that organize the knowledge associated with the production. Based on this discussion, I offer some suggestions in order to broaden the understanding and teaching of writing and digital literacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I view writing as a communicative practice, and ask how and in what ways teachers and students define the role of writing in relation to digital video composition. While there is much research on the importance of multimodal composition, and teachers are being encouraged to incorporate more digital making into their curricula, we need to more fully examine children's classroom writing and meaning-making practices as they work in newer modes like video. I use a sketch of the work of one student to examine what I see as the continued primacy of paper-and-pencil or computer-screen writing even in a digital video making process. I also discuss the ways children saw writing along a continuum of utility, from more to less useful, depending on their own perspectives on writing in general and on writing's role in the production of videos. I show how the boundaries that teachers maintain between writing and speaking matter less to some students than they do to teachers. I close with some suggestions for how we should approach the theoretical and pragmatic challenges of writing for digital video production in school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores challenges faced when curriculum designers address pre-service English teachers as digital writers, in a "teacher as writer" program. The article considers the resilience of print dominance in writing, including in tertiary digital education spaces and how the rhetoric of digital expansion is accompanied by practices of proscription and constraint. While curriculum theory encourages pre-service teachers to think of themselves as agentive digital communicators, designers, and producers, their capacity to actually perform as digital writers during their formal studies may be limited. Teachers, meanwhile, may have ambivalent feelings about broadening definitions of writing. It seems that the entrenched nature of traditional literacies in education, despite rapid social change in broader communication media, results from a complex assemblage of generational and sexual politics, conservative or neoliberal agendas, and teacher workloads, capabilities and identities. The article invites others to consider contradictions in their own contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital writing is constantly in tension with the way that school recontextualizes forms of resistance and vernacular knowledge in order to sustain control and power relations across society. Yet the social practices of digital writing are diverse, wide-ranging and constantly challenge forms of authorized knowledge across a variety of different social domains. This article considers definitions of digital writing (what is counted as such, by whom and in whose interests?) with the aim of disentangling vernacular and formal "digital writing" literacies. The discourse of other art fields (film and photography especially) raises questions about the logocentrism of print. Such discussion of variation in forms of expressivity and communication challenges and redefines what counts as writing in a conventional sense. I argue that the balance between school control over what counts as writing is under constant stress and is central to the politics of literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we take a close look at the authoritative discourses of digital writing development communicated through the US Common Core State Standards, inclusive of its marketing materials (e.g., website, supplemental documents, and videos). Digital writing is largely missing from the CCSS and its limited inclusion is predominantly in the service of reading and reading assessment. We argue that rather than offering a roadmap for digital writing development drawn on decades of research and theorization of writing in a digital age, the CCSS implicitly draws on larger authoritative discourses of development as competitiveness, a staircase, and assessment. To begin to shift these discourses, we suggest that efforts must be made a multiple scales of influence such as bringing together coalitions of professional organizations and universities, and creating media campaigns. Policy makers and administrators need to work alongside teachers, parents, and students to recognize authoritative discourses of standards at play in their schools and intercede in their perpetuation. Such work has the potential to restructure schools to allow for multiple pathways of humanizing, culturally sustaining digital writing development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses a lens of procedural literacies to theorize youth practices of digital game-playing, modification, and creation as digital writing. The concept of procedurality describes the ways that videogames and other digital media are composed of systems of processes—computational or otherwise, which define these artifacts in form, function, and cultural expression. Drawing on examples of children's game-making in library-based computer programming clubs, the article outlines implications for the practice of teaching digital writing through a lens of procedural literacies. With regard to issues of assessment, the article underscores the importance of shifting away from paradigms of measurement and standardization, and toward an inquiry-based stance aimed at valuing the expanding communicative repertoires of digital writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tensions between high school writing curricula and students' lived literacies persist in spite of burgeoning research in multimodal composition. Drawn from the second iteration of a multi-year formative experiment, this narrative explores the dissonance stemming from the meeting of these two worlds in a project titled Digital Self Portrait. This conceptual article includes one 10th grade student's digital multimodal project titled "Offline," which was created on social media. "Offline" demonstrates how students can draw on various lived literacies, or resources and experiences, to successfully navigate digital writing in ways that mirror school-sanctioned writing outcomes. The second half of the study explored the change in pedagogical practice that occurred when the teacher learned to trust her students to take ownership of writing in all of its forms. In addition, as the teacher who partnered in the project reconsidered her instructional practices, this study explored how she reconceptualizes students' ownership of their own writing across many multimodal forms [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research methods landscape has the potential to be quite diverse. However, the paradigmatic battles between the two empirical research camps (quantitative and qualitative) and the more recent embracement of mixed-methods research has narrowly focused many fields' attention, including that of composition studies, away from other sorts of useful methods, such as theoretical research. To address this, this sequential two-part study compares and contrasts the (a) purpose, (b) instruments, (c) data, and (d) structure of quantitative and qualitative research. Drawing on this four-part structure, this study advances composition studies research methods literature by posing and testing a definition of theoretical research through an examination of full-length core composition studies texts (N = 12). The article concludes by explaining the study's relevance to the field and offering directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite an intense focus on improving Australian students’ writing performance in recent years, and comprehensive instructional advice to English teachers, researchers have noted a lack of gains in standardised writing tests and negative effects on student engagement and learning. In this paper we claim that these outcomes are partly attributable to current orthodoxies around how writing is conceptualised, taught and tested. In reviewing relevant literature and drawing on a case study with low SES students, we propose the need for more diversity in the ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ of students’ writing experiences. In putting this case, we are not arguing that the current intense focus on technical and rhetorical competence (the ‘how’ of writing) should be abandoned, but rather that students can benefit from more focus on and say in the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of this activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues on author Ira J. Allen's contention that composition is the ethical negotiation of fantastical selves. Issues addressed are the theories of agential realism and neurophenomenology, Allen's rejection of posthumanism, the view that autonomy is a creative and interactive activity of self-organized and spontaneous systems, agency as an emergent property of embodied individuals, and human feelings of selves and agency as fantasies negotiated through conscious human effort.

This article argues that rhetoric-focused first-year composition curricula may effectively use feminist revisions to rhetoric by employing a method the author calls procedural feminism, or the distillation of feminist rhetorical practices and theory within curricular development that does not make feminism a topic students will directly engage. The author argues that employing procedural feminism can move students to become more ethical participants in public discourse while circumventing student resistance to ideological classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through surveys and interviews of 433 doctoral faculty and students, we explore professional self-care practices and related issues of academic guilt, imposter syndrome, and burnout. We argue that self-care should be included as a professional practice, taught and modeled, to prepare doctoral students for careers as functional and healthy faculty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the benefits of integrating multimodal composition in language arts classrooms. It provides core features and practices of multimodal composition workshops and maker spaces in language arts teaching. Also discussed are three tensions constraining progress related to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), high-stakes testing, and the need for professional development support.

The article discusses the teaching of Georgia authors Flannery O'Connor and Alice Walker in an honors first-year multimodal composition class at Georgia Tech in 2017. Topics discussed include several activities done by the students including creating podcasts and visual design projects and the use of multimodal communication for the university's Writing and Communication Program.

First-year writing courses can be a challenge for both instructors and students. This paper describes a first-year writing course developed, taught and continuously refined by one classicist. The course combines writing instruction with primary and secondary material relating to the ancient world. Students who might otherwise never take a classics course can thus engage with ancient Greece and Rome. Such a course can extend Classics into other areas of the college curriculum and expand the number of students who learn about antiquity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Writing in the Discipline (WID) concepts lend themselves to execution in an online realm, where written communication is the primary means of contact between students and instructors. The author instituted WID in an online section of a 1-credit research class and found the WID framework also made it easier for students to demonstrate information literacy. WID provides space within a course for students to become accustomed to the discourse of a discipline, writing to understand before being asked to formally communicate. This article explains the concepts behind WID and outlines how it was executed within an urban community college online class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses methods of teaching difficult college-level literature. It suggests having students imitate the style of the writer being studied, applying it to contemporary issues in fun or silly ways. It proposes having students do composition exercises dating from the era being studied, for example the "Poetria Nova" of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, a rhetoric and composition book of the middle ages. Another example given is the assignment to write what you ate for breakfast in the style of Mary Wallstonecraft using one exceedingly long sentence, then write a reply to Edmund Burke defending constitutional democracy in his style, and then rendering specified sentences from Burke in 21st-century English. The author recounts using these methods to the enthusiastic acceptance of her students.

The authors featured in this department column share instructional practices that support transformative literacy teaching and disrupt "struggling reader" and "struggling writer" labels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aims at investigating how Blog-Assisted Language Learning (BALL) can enhance EFL tertiary learners' writing performance covering complexity, accuracy, and fluency through collaborative action research while at the same time it seeks to discover new knowledge that can inform the implementation of BALL in a writing class. This study employed Collaborative Classroom Action Research conducted in one cycle in one consecutive semester intended to make improvement in the teaching and learning of writing using BALL. There were 30 students of a university level majoring in English Education Department who joined Advanced Essay Writing Class in this study. The data were collected through interview, open-ended questionnaire followed by in-depth interview, and writing test. The findings showed that EFL learners improve their writing performance and they become more active in online class condition with two atmospheres: collaboration and competition among the learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This quasi-experimental intervention study examines the effect of genre-based instructional practices on 90 primary students' narrative writing achievements and is a result of six teachers' action to meet the educational goals of the Swedish national curriculum. Specifically, the authors examine the effects of Joint Construction, the phase in the genre pedagogical model of the Sydney School known as the Teaching and Learning Cycle, in which teachers and students work together to co-construct texts. Joint Construction has been put forward as the most powerful part of the Teaching and Learning Cycle. The authors challenge this argument, presenting findings that are inconsistent with this widely held belief. Using a pretest-posttest control group design, the study shows that the Joint Construction stage did not significantly improve the quality of students' narrative writing or increase the text length of their writings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary takes a teaching practice and teacher education perspective on complexity in Instructed Second Language Acquisition. It takes the stance that it is essential to understand if and how linguistic complexity relates to learning challenges, what the implications are for language pedagogy, and how this challenges the role of the teacher. Research shows that differences in task complexity may lead to differences in linguistic complexity in language learners' speech or writing. Different tasks (e.g. descriptive vs narrative) and different modes (oral vs written) may lead to different types and levels of complexity in language use. On the one hand, this is a challenge for language assessment, as complexity in language performance has been shown to be affected by task characteristics. On the other hand, it is an opportunity for language teaching: using a diversity of tasks, modes and text types may evoke and stretch lexically and syntactically complex language use. It is argued that it is essential for teachers to understand that it is at least as important to aim for development in complexity as it is to aim for development in accuracy. That is, that 'errors' in language learning are part of the deal: complex tasks lead to complex language use, including lexical and syntactical errors, but they are a prerequisite for language development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complexity of L2 output during oral or written task performance has been associated with the process of restructuring; that is, a qualitative change of the internal L2 system by which interlanguage becomes more elaborate and more efficient in communication. While online pressures may restrain the occurrence of restructuring in oral production, the availability of time and visibility of output in writing might create optimal conditions to deploy more complex linguistic structures, with the concomitant interlanguage development. To test these claims, we conducted a study in which we explored if and how the manifestation of lexical, syntactic and propositional L2 complexity was moderated by the mode in which the task was performed. Our participants were 290 instructed L2 learners. They performed orally and in writing a narrative video-retelling task. The analysis revealed moderating task-modality effects on L2 complexity. We found that the written texts displayed higher scores on all the sub-dimensions of syntactic and lexical complexity. Differences were also observed in the way speakers and writers conveyed the propositional content of the task. We interpret these findings as evidence of the facilitating conditions for restructuring during written production in instructed settings and, accordingly, of the language-learning-potential of L2 writing tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the effect of instructional design on (morpho)syntactic complexity in second language (L2) writing development. We operationalised instructional design in terms of task type and empirically based the investigation on a large subcorpus (669,876 writings by 119,960 learners from 128 tasks at all Common European Framework of Reference for Languages levels) of the EF-Cambridge Open Language Database (EFCAMDAT; Geertzen, Alexopoulou and Korhonen 2014). First, the 128 task prompts were manually categorised for task type (e.g. argumentation, description). Next, developmental trajectories of syntactic complexity from A1 to C2 were established using a variety of global (e.g. mean length of clause) and specific (e.g. non-third person singular present tense verbs) measures extracted using natural language processing techniques. The effects of task type were analysed using the categorisation from the first step. Finally, tasks that showed atypical behaviour for a measure given their task type were explored qualitatively. Our results partially confirm earlier experimental and corpus-based studies (e.g. subordination associated with argumentative tasks). Going beyond, our large-scale data-driven analysis made it possible to identify specific measures that were naturally prompted by instructional design (e.g. narrations eliciting wh-phrases). We discuss which measures typically align with certain task types and highlight how instructional design relates to L2 developmental trajectories over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study analyses the impact of a bilingual Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programme vis-à-vis a regular monolingual programme on the development of different aspects of L2 learners' linguistic (syntactic, morphological and lexical) complexity. Five pupils enrolled in a Dutch--English CLIL programme in a secondary school in the Netherlands are compared with five peers following the mainstream programme with English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching. The longitudinal development of these ten pupils' linguistic complexity in L2-English is investigated by means of six complexity measures calculated for each of eleven writing tasks collected over a period spanning their first nineteen months of secondary education. Linear mixed models are used to estimate the effects of time and programme type on the pupils' L2 complexity. The results indicate that both groups of learners significantly increase the complexity of their L2 writing over the course of the study. Surprisingly, only limited effects of programme type (CLIL vs non-CLIL) are found, despite considerable differences in the quantity and quality of instructional exposure to the target language, suggesting that for these pupils increased and more varied instructional exposure to the L2 in the CLIL programme did not lead to significantly different L2 productions in terms of linguistic complexity. Several possible explanations for these findings are considered and the implications for CLIL research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This classroom study aims to explore the instructional effects of structure-based (SB) or dynamic usage-based (DUB) instruction with free response, communicative writing tasks after three years of L2-French instruction on linguistic complexity measures in (morpho)syntax and lexicon. We investigated data from forty-three young high school beginner learners of L2-French after three years of instruction with similar amounts of L2 exposure. The SB treatment included a traditional focus on explicit grammar; the DUB group was taught using the Accelerated Integrated Method, a highly communicative, meaning-focused method without explicit instruction, but with a great deal of exposure and repetition to induce frequency effects. Results after three years show that DUB instruction leads to more linguistic complexity in terms of various (morpho)syntactic and some lexical measures (multi-word sequences coverage). On other lexical measures (such as Guiraud index and average word length), no differences were found. The results are discussed using insights from the dynamic usage-based perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite national efforts to accelerate students through precollegiate writing course sequences to transfer-level composition, questions persist regarding appropriate placement and the support needed for students to succeed. An analytical text-based writing assessment was administered to students across four levels of composition courses at a California community college. Differences in student writing scores between course levels and the relationship between writing score, course level, and high school GPA were examined. Key findings include (1) significant differences in average scores between the first precollegiate course and other courses in the sequence and (2) weak relationships between course level and high school GPA and assessment scores and high school GPA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay revisits the topic and purpose of Robert Connors' 1984 essay "Journals in Composition Studies," which stands alongside the work of Maureen Goggin as the most cited and circulated on the topic of journal publications. Topics covered the state of composition studies journals as they existed in the summer of 2018, a characterization of the contents and contributions of a dozen scholarly journals, and the opportunities and responsibilities of teachers and writers in composition studies.

The author explores how one teacher at a newcomer school (a school for recently arrived immigrants) used dialogue journaling and write‐alouds as instructional and community‐building tools in her work with multilingual ninth‐grade students with limited or interrupted formal education in their home countries. The analysis shows how the focal teacher used dialogue journaling to engage students in meaningful writing opportunities that identified and built background knowledge and facilitated context‐rich literacy instruction through accompanying scaffolded write‐alouds in which comprehensible input was provided. The author concludes with recommendations for how other teachers of language learners can utilize write‐alouds and dialogue journaling in their instruction of culturally and linguistically diverse students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"I advocate for a wellness-themed first-year composition curriculum in which students read texts on relevant topics and complete writing and presentation tasks that engage with current college health conversations. Drawing from my experiences designing and piloting such a course, I aim to show how a wellness theme can bridge students' transition from high school to college by supporting their development both academically and personally. Developing such a course presents challenges, but with careful curricular planning, an instructor can open up new avenues for student learning and growth. Ultimately, a wellness theme can invite students not only to develop rhetorical knowledge but also to reflect upon their own wellness practices and therefore cultivate personal self-awareness." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to comprehend the importance that grammar has in the teaching of writing in the Hispanic American countries and Spain. To achieve this, the discussion that has taken place in these countries about the importance of sentence grammar in the teaching of writing is analysed. Three proposals for the contextualised teaching of grammar are systematised from the literature review: those that are focused in the writing process, those focused on metalinguistic reflection and those with a greater emphasis in the grammar of text. Besides, the school curricula of 14 Spanish-speaking countries that were involved in the international assessment of TERCE are examined. This analysis shows an evident attachment to the communicative approach of grammar. This means that in almost all countries grammar is taught linked to the linguistic skills of reading, writing or orality, with an especial emphasis in writing. Also, two tendencies can be observed in the curricula of this countries, that guide the way in which curricula use sentence grammar to have an impact on written communication: (i) from sentence grammar to text grammar and (ii) from text grammar to sentence grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though it has been insufficiently noticed, Kenneth Burke spoke at the first meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Chicago on March 25, 1950. Archival sources reveal that his remarks--"Rhetoric--Old and New"--drew from his recently completed A Rhetoric of Motives and from another volume, The War of Words, that he intended to publish separately. Burke sought to restore instruction in rhetoric to composition courses, explained his newly developed concept of "identification," and later saw the published version of his remarks mysteriously missing from the first issue of College Composition and Communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to reflect on pedagogical strategies which support the teaching of critical analysis of visual and multimodal texts in a tertiary-level course for Arts students. Design/methodology/approach: The paper describes strategies which focus on developing students' abilities to express interpretive critique, as opposed to mere description. These strategies give students strong scaffolding towards success in their interpretive writing. The course in question is a tertiary-level Arts course which teaches Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) approach to "reading images" in relation to contemporary media texts. The basic structure of the course is described, along with the macro steps which underpin the pedagogy. Examples of highly successful and less successful student writing are compared to reveal the key components of effective interpretive answers. Findings: In addition to the normal expectations regarding essay structure and style, and in addition to mastery of the technicality of the course, successful and less successful student writing depends on their mastery of a specific set of moves within the essay. These moves integrate textual observations with clear explanations and a strong relation to interpretation. Practical implications: While the course and strategies discussed are for tertiary-level students, the strategies described are adaptable to primary and secondary levels also. Multimodal texts are an integral part of the English curriculum, and all teachers need to explore strategies for enabling their students' critical engagement with such texts. Originality/value: Visual and multimodal texts are an exciting and also challenging part of English curricula, and new analytical frameworks and pedagogical strategies are needed to tackle these texts. In particular, the gap between simply describing visual resources (applying the tools) and critical analysis (using the tools) is vast, and specific pedagogical strategies are needed to help students develop the necessary interpretive language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to current trends in Composition as well as the challenges of langauging and pedagogy in the global reality, this qualitative classroom-based action research study was designed to gain a better understanding of strategies, practices, and competences exhibited by students of various linguistic and cultural backgrounds when composing, reading, and responding to the narratives of their peers in a multilingual composition class. In a focused presentation of a single student case study, the manuscript conceptualizes 'effective' writing in global contexts, outlines successful strategies to gain the 'buy-in' from culturally and linguistically diverse audiences when composing transnationally and translingually. The study concludes by suggesting ways and strategies to transform 'traditional' peer response assignments to engage global rhetorics and transnational frameworks for the sake of all students and their success communicating across languages, rhetorics, borders, and modes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to contribute knowledge on children's narrative writing from a pedagogical perspective. Through analyses of nine- to ten-year-old students' narrative writing, aspects that are critical to discern in order to write narratives with a well-developed plot are formulated. The theoretical framework is narratology theories and Variation Theory. Narratology provides a conceptual framework for describing narrative writing, while Variation Theory offers a pedagogical perspective. A total of 80 narratives written by students have been analyzed, and five qualitatively different approaches to writing were seen. Narrative writing can be approached as describing events, solving a problem, creating action, making jokes and composing a narrative. A comparison between these approaches revealed five aspects that are critical for children to discern in order to develop the ability to write narratives: the discernment of a reader, the function of a narrative, the narrative structure, coherence, and duration. These aspects can be discerned in a more or less powerful way. The study contributes to the field by offering teachers guidance in what aspects are critical to address when teaching narrative writing in school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the comprehensive research university described in this study, some students taking a required, first-semester, composition course in the fall make great progress in their ability to draft and revise the curriculum's major essays. Yet, they still fail the class. Many of these students are on their way to becoming practiced writers but require additional assistance to move beyond a definition of revision consisting solely of editing and proofreading strategies. To support such students, I created a voluntary, spring-semester, Composition I course foregrounding both lower- and higher-order revision practices in which students could continue to work on previous assignment drafts from fall. In a three-year, mixed methods, case study involving an experimental course-design model, students enrolling in a Composition I class focused on revision strategies demonstrated both positive revision-related drafting and course outcomes, according to findings. This article includes a description of the course's framework and its assessment practices. The results of this study have implications for teaching revision in first-year composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strength of audience awareness has a great influence on the content selection, expression and writing techniques of the article. Therefore, the cultivation of the students' audience awareness in writing becomes one of the key factors that determine the qualities of the students' compositions. This thesis conducts a questionnaire and interviews on college students from the four grades of Nanchang Normal University in order to reveal the college students' cognitive status and attitude of audience awareness. Based on the status quo, this thesis analyzes the possible causes of this situation from two aspects: the teachers' carelessness on audience awareness and overly concern with writing skills, and the students' shortage of language ability and logical thinking ability and their excessive attention to writing skills. For these reasons, this thesis proposes corresponding countermeasures: in the English writing class, the reader's awareness should be emphasized; the theme of the article needs to be much closer to life; students are supposed to create imaginary readers in writing; the method of readers' feedback should be fully utilized. The use of these strategies will effectively help college students cultivate audience awareness in English writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the guest editors discuss articles in the issue on topics including digital writing, writing in curriculum and policy, and interrelationship of meta-literacy writing principles.

The video essay is an opportunity for students to record their words and combine other visual elements to complete the typical requirements of a standard written paper. Applicable across disciplines and pedagogically aligned with an honors ethos of self-directed learning, video essays allow for individual and collaborative forms of expression while providing unique approaches to compositional assessment on an array of subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In response to the widely acknowledged challenge of instructor expertise in multimodal composition (MC) teaching, our article discusses a pedagogical approach called distributed collaboration (DC)—an approach that facilitates collaboration among specialists with varied expertise (e.g., new media specialists, software specialists, community members, local professionals, student teams) in an effort to provide L1 and L2 writers with the support required to deepen their multimodal literacies, develop communicative expertise, and enhance the quality of their multimodal texts. To illustrate the ways that students' multimodal writing knowledge, English language learning, and multimodal texts might be improved through distributed collaboration, our article profiles a graduate-level course in which student writers were tasked with composing multimodal texts for an on-campus program. In sharing our findings, we hope to provide instructors of English language teaching (ELT) and L1 composition with a generative pedagogical approach for harnessing writers’ full potential in MC projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay presents the trajectory of a syllabus statement on linguistic and cultural pluralism and its role in the articulation and revision of a pedagogical approach that foregrounds students' linguistic diversity and partnerships with local communities. In recounting the steps and stakeholders involved in crafting the statement, the author argues that this statement functions as an activist text. The author also contends that the field of composition studies should take on an activist agenda when it comes to language rights. Composition studies needs to go beyond merely accepting language pluralism to actively engaging and dismantling oppressive discourses and normative practices. By establishing explicit values and ideologies, the linguistic and cultural pluralism statement has the potential to promote and foster a culture of cross-cultural and global perspectives in the classroom through students' ties to local communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]