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International audience; Researchers from France and the US compared grids for analyzing academic texts, to explore similarities and differences and to raise questions to each other. The analysis focused on two US and three French grids for analyzing students’ and scholars’ academic texts. The comparative work makes it possible to shed light on fairly fundamental choices in terms of the relationship to the norm, to evaluation, to prescription, and to description; in terms of the constitution of data, the elaboration of units of analysis, and processing tools; and in terms of the theoretical foundations of methodological choices, the modalities of the comparative approach.

Student error analysis is an area of investigation that can shed light on how students learn. It can also serve as a pedagogical tool to increase students’ awareness of the most common types of errors to avoid. Quality of student output, however, isn’t solely determined by the number of errors students make, but also the extent to which students successfully employ certain other discourse-related strategies to improve their compositions. This paper argues that, aside from grammatical concerns, and at least from a discourse point of view, students already possess much of the knowledge they need in order to write better compositions. Both second (L2) and heritage (HL) learners of Spanish typically already possess some advanced writing skills in English, but we have observed that when attempting to write in Spanish, many of these same students will resort to more remedial means of presenting and/or expressing their ideas. In other words, unaware that so many discourse skills are transferable from English to Spanish, students will not necessarily apply the same strategies, or at least to the same degree, as they would if writing a similar essay in English. This paper, therefore, provides ten tips that students can draw on to improve both the presentation and expression of their ideas in compositions. Recommendations are divided into two categories, the first being aspects a student should always keep in mind when approaching any piece of writing, while the second are negative tendencies that are quite common, but which a student should necessarily avoid.

In Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines and Academic Literacies, researchers have produced compelling evidence of the disjunction between faculty members’ assertions that good writing is universal—i.e., the autonomous model of literacy—and faculty’s own tacit practice of discipline-specific conventions. In studies of race and language in education, scholars have identified disconnections between what teachers profess to value—e.g., students’ right to their own language—and how they actually grade. Contradictions are a natural part of any ideology, and these are commonly understood to demonstrate the resilience of the autonomous model. In this article, however, I introduce a set of theoretical tools from the sociology of scientific knowledge—namely, the concept of interpretative repertoires and of variability in participants’ interpretations as an analytic resource—that can reveal cracks in the autonomous model. Although these tools are over thirty years old, they have not circulated widely in literacy and composition studies. I apply the tools to text-based interviews with two faculty writers who had espoused universal “rules” for writing. After identifying apparent disconnections between the rules and their own practices or those of other writers with whom they worked, I present this evidence to them and analyze their explanations: They maintain that the rules still apply, but their accounts are complex, shifting, and self-contradictory. These case studies reveal, rather than its strength, the inherent instability of the autonomous model. Ultimately, I hope that these research tools can, in conjunction with systemic efforts, aid in dismantling the construct of “good writing” and its inherent privileging of white language practices.

The term resistance has been an evolving concept in literacy and composition studies. While much has been studied in terms of student resistance in high schools, first-year composition classrooms, and in university writing centers, little is known about how resistance occurs in afterschool tutoring programs between volunteer writing tutors and their tutees. Using an ethnographic case study approach, this paper examines how three adult volunteer writing tutors made sense of resistance in working with their adolescent tutees in an urban tutoring program. The findings showed that tutor attitudes, values, and reactions shaped their experience of resistance in a variety of ways including a) misreading tutee signals of engagement; b) masking expectations of cultural and linguistic compliance within a discourse of resistance; and c) embracing resistance as a bridge to tutor growth. The author uses these findings to inform current conceptions of student resistance and compliance and to provide implication for volunteer tutor training.

Solid waste decision makers use waste composition studies in sustainability planning and as metrics to measure their environmental benefits (e.g., recycling rates). In many of these studie...

Peer Assessment has received the lion’s share of attention in recent composition studies. It is a teaching strategy used to raise the bars by exposing compositionists to a new teaching perspective to enhance their classrooms’ collaborative writing use. The purpose of this quantitative study is to investigate undergraduate student writers’ (assessors/assessees) perceptions regarding the factors (Gender/Used Technology/Technology skills/Peer Assessment Preferences/Age) directing their satisfaction of Peer Assessment’s use in terms of their learning styles in Online Composition classes. Survey responses were collected from 149 Composition students in a Public Health College of a private university in New York City. The results indicate a statistically significant strong positive correlation between students’ perceptions of Peer Assessment used in English writing classes and their learning styles in the online environment. However, participants’ intrapersonal learning styles formulate the highest correlation with their perceptions. There is a statistically significant relationship between students’ perceptions of Peer Assessment and their preferences for feedback in the various language areas. An increase in students’ perception of receiving peer feedback on the quality of ideas, the flow of ideas, vocabulary, mechanics, and grammar, in that order, strongly led to an increase in their Peer Assessment perception. Students’ perceptions of their technology skills statistically significantly predict their perceptions of using Peer Assessment in online writing classes. Nevertheless, the findings revealed no differences based on gender and age. Implications of these relationships are discussed.

This study examines the experiences of five Egyptian undergraduate students at the American University in Cairo (AUC) from different educational, class and geographic backgrounds. This study finds that students from public schooling and lower socioeconomic backgrounds arrive at AUC with significant language, literacy and social deficits compared to counterparts from private schooling and high socioeconomic backgrounds. The study considers how participants, based on the backgrounds, become involved with transnational literacy practices in university writing assignments. The study draws upon scholarship in transnational literacy studies, to inflect how New Literacy Studies considers global and local literacies with concepts of capital and positionality drawn from Pierre Bourdieu. The study conceptualizes student educational and class backgrounds as forms of cultural and social capital which, when deployed at AUC, result in differing participant positionality along educational and class lines. Although this distribution creates challenges for students from public schooling backgrounds, the study also finds that a student from a public schooling background exhibited unusually adaptive qualities, resulting in novel approaches to completing a complex literacy task. The study concludes by arguing that transnational literacy studies be extended to account for intranational movements within uniquely configured embedded, hybrid and permeable transnational spaces that serve local interests.

Growing numbers of scholars in composition studies support translingual orientations in their postsecondary writing classrooms. However, translingual orientations are rarely extended to elementary school writers, who are often asked to compose exclusively in Dominant American English. Drawing on theories of translingualism and emergent biliteracy, we use case study methods to examine children’s translingual writing in a highly linguistically diverse second-grade classroom. We pay particular attention to students who had not had formal instruction in languages they tended to use orally, documenting the creative and strategic ways in which they wrote. Among other strategies, students repurposed English sound–symbol correspondences in developmental spelling, composed strings of non-Roman symbols, and remixed multilingual environmental print. They also engaged in translingual writing for a range of purposes, such as expressing pride, connecting with audiences, and indexing identities. Our findings suggest the potential of moving translingual perspectives beyond postsecondary contexts and into elementary classrooms.

Several major problems with peer review exist in the related humanities disciplines of rhetoric, communication, and composition studies: a preponderance of incompetent reviewers, a lack of constructive criticism and the maintenance of orthodoxy, relative ease in identifying blinded authors, editorial passivity, and long waits to receive reviews. We propose five solutions: training for reviewers and editors, reviewers signing their reviews, payment for reviewers, thirty-day review turnaround, and guidelines for reviewing promoted by collective action. Before such solutions could be implemented, however, the existing problems must be acknowledged.

Although composition scholars have long advocated for working-class and under-represented populations on campus, the emergence of “first-generation college” as a marker of difference in public, administrative, and scholarly discourses invites further consideration of how we theorize this marker. As a bureaucratic marker (originating in higher education administration) that exhibits potential for organizing students for self-advocacy across difference, “first-generation college” warrants particular attention from scholars interested in the intersections between literacy studies and rhetoric. This article initiates a conversation about FGC as a marker of difference, observing that the bureaucratic and rhetorical nature of “first-generation college” as a marker necessitates a constitutive rhetorical approach to the term, an investigation of how the use of the term articulates a literate positionality, situates it within local and cultural narratives, and assigns it value. Placing composition scholarship in conversation with interviews with 17 first-generation college and low-income students and alumni of a large state university, this article reads first-generation college literate positionality in light of students’ own use of the identifier and within the context of their accounts of navigating class difference in college.

Scholarship in literacy and composition studies has demonstrated the many connections between literacy education and citizenship production (e.g. Guerra, Wan). Despite often being neglected in conversations about literacy education and citizenship training, prison education programs and incarcerated students have a unique relationship to citizenship and can make an important contribution to that scholarship. By putting literacy studies in conversation with queer studies and critical prison studies, I argue that we as literacy educators and teachers can train ourselves to notice and push back against the harmful ideologies underlying the discourse around prison literacy education programs and citizenship education. This attention to language is essential because it has a material effect on the incarcerated students we teach, as well as the futures we imagine for our classes, programs, and the wider landscape of prison education.

The authors use their university and its writing program as a case study to interrogate established wraparound support systems for foster youth and the role that additional, volunteer faculty – led support services can play in retention and graduation rates. This chapter first provides research on college-going foster youth in the United States. Then, it considers the foster youth population and established support programs at the University of California, Riverside. Next, this chapter reviews the benefits of faculty – student mentoring and tutoring, specifically in composition studies, and how those benefits can contribute to a successful college-going experience. The chapter then shifts to offering a model for those interested in establishing a similar program. Using business, communication, composition, education, and psychosocial theory to ground the discussion, the authors provide a detailed account of the proposal, implementation, and ongoing programmatic administration processes, including the rationale undergirding decision-making. Ultimately, they show how equitable supplemental academic support led by composition faculty can bridge the gap between existing foster youth services and outstanding needs, an innovative approach that relies on the natural mentoring relationships which organically evolve from faculty–student interaction.

L’article a pour objectif de fournir des repères pour l’analyse linguistique des enjeux de connaissance dans le discours scientifique, à partir d’un état des lieux de travaux existants. Il montre d’abord comment les études des sciences ont mis en évidence l’intérêt d’analyser l’activité scientifique à travers les signes et les textes qu’elle produit. Il se centre ensuite sur les analyses linguistiques du discours scientifique et sur ce qu’elles permettent de dire quant à l’activité scientifique et la manière dont elle se construit à travers ses discours. Il conclut sur les diverses options retenues dans l’analyse des enjeux de connaissance. The litterature review presented here is aimed to provide a background for linguistic analysis of scientific discourse (and/or academic discourse) and its knowledge issues. It is first shown how science studies have been interested in analysing scientific activity through the signs and texts it produces. The second part focuses on the linguistic analysis of scientific discourse and what it can say about the scientific activity. In the conclusion are discussed the various ways to adress knowlede issues of scientific discourse. El objetivo del artículo es aportar elementos para el análisis lingüístico de los aspectos cognitivos del discurso científico, a partir de los trabajos existentes. En primer lugar muestra como los estudios de la ciencia han puesto en evidencia el interés de analizar la actividad científica a través de los signos y textos que produce. En segundo lugar se centra en el análisis lingüístico del discurso científico y en lo que es capaz de expresar la actividad científica así como la manera como ésta se construye a través del discurso. En la conclusión se presentan la s diferentes formas de enfocar los aspectos cognitivos del discurso científico.

While there have been several studies on primary and secondary English education in Singapore, less research has been done on academic writing courses at the tertiary level. This study presents the results of a survey, which aimed to find out the pedagogical approaches and skills prioritized by tertiary-level writing teachers in Singapore. The project was guided by the following questions: (1) What is the dominant approach to teaching writing courses in Singapore? (2) What are the educational backgrounds of writing teachers in Singapore and does this relate to the pedagogical approaches that inform their teaching? (3) What practices do these teachers prioritize in the work they do as teachers and in their learning outcomes? (4) What are the typical assignments, class sizes, and teaching loads for Singaporean writing/communication classes? The results suggest that most teachers of Singaporean writing classes have a background in linguistics and take an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) approach; however, there was also some evidence of a blended approach between EAP and composition studies. The study proposes that, as Singaporean students become more proficient in English, this blended approach may present the best way forward for teaching academic writing in Singapore. Nanyang Technological University Submitted/Accepted version This work was supported by Nanyang Technological University, [Grant M4082339] IRB-2019-04-029-01.

This chapter presents a historical overview of digital and material multimodality in composition studies and discusses the role of materiality in activism and education. It argues for the value of digital and non-digital work and provides sample teaching materials.

One of the hardest battles that composition practitioners encounter within the writing classroom is dealing with students' poor writing skills. Traditional methods that only engage students to produce work that does not make use of the students' faculties, only propel students to continue to create work that is unsatisfactory. Currently, as composition practitioners continue to look for teaching strategies that can help their students become better writers, they often believe that reading, speaking, and listening cannot facilitate the teaching of writing. Because of the historical views that have defined the composition field, the discipline does not allow any other paradigms to redefine or shape how writing is taught. What is needed to combat such problematic teaching pedagogy is the institution of other methods that incorporates the use of writing, listening, reading, and speaking to teach students how to become better writers.

This teaching practice presents a classroom exercise completed in a first-year composition class at an English-medium private university in Lithuania. The course typically takes place in the second semester of the year and is required for all first-year students, who are multilingual but completing their university degree in English. The instructor, a US speaker of English who has a background in US composition studies, leads the exercise that consists of a writing style analysis that examines sentence length, word variety, and sentence emphasis, concluding with a discussion of how students can adapt their writing style to meet the needs of a new audience. The exercise aims to help students understand their writing style and what they need to know to adapt their style to fit the academic writing context in the university.

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.