Reflection can form the basis for powerful dialogue between the arts and literacy as we seek interpretive and expressive fluency across modes. Through deep, cumulative reflection we make aspects of our world and experiences more perceivable, and open them up for artistic expression and aesthetic inquiry. Such reflections are also the catalysts for…

In the light of international interest in teachers' literate identities and practices, this paper addresses the under-researched area of teachers' writing identities. It examines the multimodal interactive discursive practices at play in the writing classroom of a teacher in the UK who, in order to support the pupils, consciously…

Writing is a complex and learned activity in that it requires us to shape our thoughts into words and texts that are appropriate for the purpose, audience and medium of a variety of communicative forms. Writers must constantly make decisions about how to represent their subject matter and themselves through language. In this way, writing can be…

This study explored college students' experiences with and perceptions of integrating both the Google.doc and peer e-tutors into an English writing course. This socio-cultural study employed online collaborative learning mechanisms with an attempt to develop students' English writing skills and motivation over the course of one year.…

The practice of assessing student poetry is neither widespread nor widely theorised. In fact, its absence in the literature is itself worthy of comment and conjecture. This article begins with an account of a writing workshop for pre-service teachers, which highlighted the way participants found themselves tongue-tied when asked to engage in the…

Writing is a complex, recursive and difficult process that requires strategic decision-making across multiple domains (Graham, 2006; Pritchard & Honeycutt, 2006). Students are expected to use this process to communicate with a variety of audiences for a variety of purposes. Modelling and providing effective instruction is critical, especially…

We offer this piece as an essay, a dialogic, many-voiced attempt to represent the tensions and contradictions in our work and the work that goes on in London schools. Locating our work within a polyphonic, narrative-based tradition of inquiry into practice (Burgess & Hardcastle, 1991; Doecke & McClenaghan, 2011; Parr, 2010; van de Ven & Doecke,…

This paper reports on school-university collaboration during an action research project, which aimed to build a writing pedagogy for students with Learning Disabilities in the trilingual, biliterate educational context of Hong Kong. The project was established through interpersonal relationships built from the ground up between stakeholders from a…

This article is concerned pragmatically with how recent research findings in assessment for learning (AfL) can bring about higher quality learning in the day-to-day classroom. The first half of this paper reviews recent studies within Black and Wiliam's (2009) framework of formative assessment and looks for insights on how pedagogical procedures…

This study investigates how genre can be used as an organisational principle to interweave teaching and assessment in the L2 school context. Relying on data from interviews and lesson observations gathered from two Secondary 1 (that is, Grade 7) Hong Kong classrooms, the study sought to discover how teachers implemented genre-based teaching and…

New Zealand students in the middle and upper school achieve better results in reading than they do in writing. This claim is evident in national assessment data reporting on students' literacy achievement. Research findings also state that teachers report a lack of confidence when teaching writing. Drawing on the National Writing Project developed…

This classroom narrative proposes a process for reinventing academic research and writing in secondary schools for the 21st Century. We build on Macrorie's (1988) I-Search paper, drawing on affordances of Web 2.0 technologies and culture, to initiate the iSearch 2.0 process. iSearch 2.0 consists of four phases: 1) messing about and trying on…

This article examines the effects of using intertextual theories to refine writing instruction in culturally diverse contexts, in terms of transfer of learning. Within a wider, two-year intervention study in six schools, four teachers were observed for a term each to describe how intertextual theories resulted in refinements to writing instruction…

This study applied Wiki technology and peer review to an English as a foreign language writing class. The objective was to investigate whether this system, as a collaborative platform, would improve students' writing skills. The study gauged students' perceptions about integrating a Wiki writing course and peer feedback. The participants were 32…

This paper investigates the current dismissal of feeling from teaching and learning in the college composition classroom. Drawing on the teaching experiences and the concept of lore, it argues that the practices and pedagogies of composition studies continue to produce a division between reason and emotion, denying the body's epistemic potential.…