This article presents the text of Keith Gilyard's presidential address, delivered at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Annual Convention in Las Vegas, Nevada, on November 18, 2012. In his address he proposes several core elements that he believes will instrumentally improve the education system in the United States: a rich…

Although mounting research evidence suggests that dialogic teaching correlates with student achievement gains and with high levels of student engagement, little work in English education addresses the challenge of supporting new teachers in developing dialogically organized instructional practices. In a design-based study, we examine a curricular…

This paper presents a study designed from a socially situated and activity theory perspective aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of how Ph.D. students regulate their academic writing activity. Writing regulation is a complex activity of a highly situated and social nature, involving cyclical thought-action-emotion dynamics and the…

The purpose of the present study is to examine concurrent and predictive evidence used in the validation of ACCUPLACER, a purchased test used to place first-year students into writing courses at an urban, public research university devoted to science and technology education. Concurrent evidence was determined by correlations between ACCUPLACER…

This article presents the author's presidential address, delivered at the NCTE Annual Convention in Chicago, Illinois, on November 20, 2011. The author focuses on the powerful stories that define educators. The author's point is that telling one's story is one of the most important things an educator can do for those he/she teaches as well as for…

In order to prepare effective writing teachers, teacher educators need an understanding of how preservice preparation programs, inservice professional development, and the policies and practices of K-12 schools work together to influence teachers' writing instruction. This qualitative case study uses complexity theory (Davis & Sumara, 2006) to…

Young adults represent the most avid users of social network sites, and they are also the most concerned with their online identity management, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. These practices represent important literate activity today, as individuals who are writing online learn to negotiate interfaces, user agreements,…

The concept of voice has long attracted the attention of teachers, but more recently has also been the focus of a growing body of research aiming to understand voice as self-representation in writing. Adopting a socio-cultural orientation to voice, studies have revealed much about how textual choices are used by readers to build images of…

This article examines the ways in which a multimodal text--a YouTube video on globalization and business--was mediated in two English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classrooms, and how these mediations shaped the instructor's and her students' meaning-making in specific ways. I first explore the complex multimodal discourses involved with this…

This article provides an initial approach for capturing moments of talk about, around, and for writing to explain why writing groups and writing conferences are so often considered "transformative" for the people involved. After describing the widespread and yet disparate transformations so often attributed to collaborative writing talk, I…

This November issue of "Research in the Teaching of English" ("RTE") once again contains the Annual Annotated Bibliography of "RTE." This bibliography includes abstracts of selected empirical research studies as well as titles of other related studies and books published between summer 2011 and summer 2012. As was the case with the 2010 and 2011…

The present study is based on interviews of students (n = 48) and instructors (n = 27) from various disciplines in a North American research university and explores participants' comments on examples of some students' unacknowledged texts appropriated and drawn from published sources, classroom learning, or unidentified prior reading. Although…

This article reflects on where and how empirical research, focusing particularly on college/adult writing and literate practice, has appeared over the last century in the complete runs of "English Journal," "College English," "College Composition and Communication," "Research in the Teaching of English," and "Teaching English in the Two-Year…

In this article, the author comments on Kevin Roozen and Karen Lunsford's insightful examination of empirical studies of college and adult writing published in NCTE journals over the last 100 years. One sees in their account the struggles for perspective that marked writing studies in this period, as researchers applied ever wider lenses to the…

In this article, we examine writing in the context of new communication technologies as a kind of everyday literacy. Using an inductive approach developed from grounded theory, we analyzed a 32,000-word corpus of college students' Instant Messaging (IM) exchanges. Through our analysis of this corpus, we identify a fifteen-item taxonomy of IM…