In this article, the author talks about Bakhtin's ethical concerns on the teaching of novels. In his writings on ethics, Bakhtin outlined numerous ways in which thinkers can avoid engaging with the world. They can live "representatively" by allowing the ideology or religion to which they subscribe make their moral decisions for them. Intellectual…

While peer review is a common practice in college composition courses, there is little consistency in approach and effectiveness within the field, owing in part to the dearth of empirical research that investigates peer-review processes. This study is designed to shed light on what a peer reviewer actually reads and attends to while providing…

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy of formulaic writing such as the five-paragraph theme (FPT) or essay for the purpose of earning high scores on high-stakes writing assessments. This qualitative descriptive study analyzed more than 1000 essays from Delaware Grade 8 and 10 writers, written for a statewide…

Despite the general trend to embrace interdisciplinarity in post-secondary education, we remain remarkably unclear concerning what we mean by interdisciplinarity and how it is achieved. Reporting on research conducted in a team-taught interdisciplinary course, I propose a new way of conceptualizing interdisciplinary connections, grounded in…

This case study closely examines how John (a former student of mine, age eight, second grade) composed during an informal writing group at school. Using qualitative research methods, I found that John selectively took up conventions, characters, story grammars, themes, and motifs from video games, television, Web pages, and comics. Likening his…

This study was conducted by members of a site of the California Writing Project in partnership with a large, urban, low-SES school district where 93% of the students speak English as a second language and 69% are designated Limited English Proficient. Over an eight-year period, a relatively stable group of 55 secondary teachers engaged in ongoing…

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of Albert Bandura's four hypothesized sources of self-efficacy on students' writing self-efficacy beliefs (N = 1256) and to explore how these sources differ as a function of gender and academic level (elementary, middle, high). Consistent with the tenets of self-efficacy theory, each of the…

"Where is God now?" is a question from the Holocaust memoir "Night" by Elie Wiesel and an underlying narrative dilemma for the teachers and most student participants in this qualitative study of three Holocaust units in secondary English classrooms in the Midwestern United States. Using a narrative theory framework, this study explores how…

This study offers an alternative to traditional notions of scaffolding for reading comprehension by tracing the evolution of a fifth-grade small group literature conversation in which the teacher sought to displace himself as "primary knower" (Berry, 1981) in the conversation. The study examines how the teacher shared evaluation with his students…

The domain of inquiry by literacy researchers has expanded greatly over the past generation. Literacy researchers now address out-of-school literacies, multimodal texts, literacy across the curriculum and other important issues. Research on literacy development has become even more important in the high stakes assessment environments in today's…

In this article, the author shares his experience growing up speaking African American Vernacular English in school and his observations about nonstandard American plantation English. The author's amateur linguistic observations about nonstandard American plantation English gave rise to immediate dialect comparisons between African American…

"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…

In this article, the author offers guidelines to teachers on shaping pedagogy and classrooms in ways that include and value the experiences and learning of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) students. In order for teachers to create a context in which gender trouble can happen without violent consequences, they need to…

Lewis explains why critical discourse analysis (CDA) has become an indispensable method for many researchers trying to understand how ideologies and social structures are reflected in and reified by language. The critical linguistic turn that has occurred in the humanities and social sciences for the last three decade has finally taken hold in the…

This conceptual essay employs psychoanalytic theory in exploring the difficulties the author's son experienced in learning to read. Emphasizing the profoundly affective and subjective dimensions of one child's movement toward and against literacy, the author considers the potential of psychoanalytic perspectives in helping teachers and researchers…