The debate surrounding how best to support African American student writers continues today as the gap between achievement scores persists. This qualitative analysis documents the classroom structures and instructional practices of two English Language Arts teachers working in a predominately African American public middle school, whose students…

This study was conducted to obtain empirical data to inform policy decisions about exempting incoming students from a first-year composition (FYC) course on the basis of Advanced Placement (AP) English exam scores. It examined the effect of avoiding first-year writing on the writing abilities of sophomore undergraduates. Two three-page writing…

In this article, we present secondary students' perceptions of their writing and writing instruction. Using the NCTE/IRA Standards as the foundation for a survey, we questioned nearly 2,000 public-school students concerning what they wrote, how they wrote, and the extent to which they wrote in their language arts classes. We chose Florida as our…

In literacy and composition studies, efforts to develop data-driven theories of disciplinary writing expertise and of writers' developmental processes in joining specific discourse communities have so far been limited. This case study, of one writer's experiences as an undergraduate history major, parses the multiple knowledge domains comprising…

Examines both what it means to teach writing and what it means to write in a first-year university course in the history of science. Investigates what students learned about writing when the focus was on subject matter and secondarily on writing and rhetoric. Raises the question of whether disciplinary courses in writing provide an authentic…

Presents a functional grammatical analysis of the writing that 128 seventh- and eighth-grade students produced in response to their science teacher's directive to describe a picture. Identifies the register elements of the task and the grammatical difficulties it posed for students. Shows that teachers can help students use grammatical resources…

Examines three questions concerning the quality of reading and writing among students: (1) is reading achievement today better or worse than in the past? (2) how well do students read in relation to the demands of their schooling and their later work? and (3) how different is reading achievement by socio-economic status? Finds that the perceived…

Argues that the standards by which literacy is judged have gone up, which produces the impression that schools are doing worse than they have in the past when in fact they are doing well. Examines a cross section of studies and data. (TB)

Reports on a study that examined the effect of intended audience and mode of discourse on the syntactic complexity of compositions written by sixth- and tenth-graders, and that attempted to determine whether there were increases in syntactic complexity from grade 6 to grade 10 for each audience and in each mode. (DD)

Reports that students who were provided between-draft teacher evaluation showed a greater degree of change, higher fluency, and greater differences in support of ideas on final drafts than students employing guided self-evaluation forms and students receiving no evaluation. (DD)

Findings indicate some evidence of the adult basic writer's reliance on the oral repertoire when communicating in the written mode. (DD)