Jory Brass and Leslie David Burns provide a useful and informative review of research appearing in the "English Journal" ("EJ") and "Research in the Teaching of English" ("RTE") over the past 100 years. It is a bit unfortunate, if understandable, to exclude books and articles in other journals, because such a restriction excludes many pieces of…

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…

Charles Bazerman reminds us of the complexity of writing. He describes his own journey of disciplined study of writing as one that has necessarily been interdisciplinary, or more precisely, that has involved a series of different disciplinary engagements, each of which is aimed at illuminating some dimension of literate activity and its social…

Using a sociohistoric developmental lens, this paper traces the construction of texts composed by fifth graders in an urban classroom in order to answer the following questions: How do children develop as writers in school? How do writing and drawing function in children's texts? How do teaching practices shape children's writing development?…

In this study we take up challenges regarding researcher positionality, representation, and the construction of difference as a launching point to reflexively analyze our own practices within a research project exploring multilingualism, multiliteracies, and teacher development. Our data were drawn from a teacher study group we facilitated during…

Composition theorists concerned with students' academic writing ability have long questioned the application of voice as a standard for writing competence, and second language compositionists have suggested that English language learners may be disadvantaged by the practice of emphasizing voice in the evaluation of student writing. Despite these…

Despite a long debate and the accompanying call for changes in the past few decades, grammar instruction in college English classes, according to some scholars, has remained largely "disempowering,""decontextualized," and "remedial" (Micciche, 2004, p. 718). To search for more effective and empowering grammar teaching, this study explores the use…

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…

In this article, I consider the literacy practices that emerged in an in-school elective course centered in the literacy tradition of African American women. Drawing from spatial perspectives (Leander& Sheehy, 2004), I explore what it means to consider this course an "Other space" (Foucault,1986), as a space created without the constraints of a…

In this methodological and theoretical article, we address the need for more cross-case work on studies of literacy in use within different social and cultural contexts. The Cultural Practices of Literacy Study (CPLS) project has been working on a methodology for cross-case analyses that are principled in that the qualitative nature of each case,…

"Research in the Teaching of English" (RTE) is the flagship research journal of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in the United States. It is a broad-based, multidisciplinary journal composed of original research articles and short scholarly essays on a wide range of topics significant to those concerned with the…

This article examines how Black girlhood is constructed through fiction. The following research question guided this study: How do writers represent the heterogeneity of urban teenage girls in school-sanctioned African American young adult literature? Five popular narratives that exemplify the contemporary lives of urban African American female…

This study compares and contrasts the selection and distribution of literary texts in the English programs of two diverse secondary schools, one in Massachusetts, USA, the other in Ontario, Canada. Analysis of the departments' curriculum documents, state/provincial curriculum policies, and teacher interviews indicated that at both schools,…

In response to growing concerns among faculty regarding the lack of attention to the bilingual student population in our pre-service teacher education program, the authors engaged in a shared self-study of the process of revising and implementing a secondary English methods course with explicit attention to the special needs of…