Science reporting in the media often involves contested issues, such as, for example, biotechnology, climate change, and, more recently, geoengineering. The reporter's framing of the issue is likely to influence readers' perception of it. The notion of framing is related to how individuals and groups perceive and communicate about the…

This article shares results from a multi-institutional study of the role of writing in college students' lives. Using case studies built from a larger population survey along with interviews, diaries, and a daily SMS texting protocol, we found that students report SMS texting, lecture notes, and emails to be the most frequent writing…

Using Ivanic's (2004) framework, the study of 20 elementary teachers examines the relationships among teachers' beliefs about writing, their instructional practices, and contextual factors. While the district-adopted curriculum reflected specific discourses, teachers' beliefs and practices reflected a combination of discourses. The…

Scholars have recently begun to conceive of literacy practices as drawing from resources that are simultaneously situated and extracontextual. In particular, studies of transnational literacy affirm the importance of both locality and movement in literacy studies. Continuing this inquiry into the situated and dispersed nature of transnational…

Peter, an African American writer from a low-income community, is followed across a 10-year period as he progresses from first grade through high school. Drawing on writing samples and interviews, the author identifies a set of interrelated dispositions that contribute to his development of "habitus" as a writer. This article considers…

The case study reported here explores the processes involved in producing a written synthesis of three history texts and their possible relation to the characteristics of the texts produced and the degree of comprehension achieved following the task. The processes carried out by 10 final-year compulsory education students (15 and 16 years old) to…

This empirical study surveyed academic staff at a Swedish university about their experiences and perceptions of the use of English in their academic fields. The objective was to examine how the influence of English in disciplinary domains might affect the viability of Swedish in the academic sphere and to investigate how it might disadvantage…

This article tracks the socialization of a Chinese intern into a Hong Kong PR company and considers the factors that enabled her to move toward acquiring the discourse of the profession. Taking a case study approach, the research is based on a detailed daily journal written by the intern during her internship, and two interviews. Over the 3-month…

In the research project Literacy Practices in Working Life, the role played by reading and writing in common nonacademic occupations in Sweden was investigated. The results highlight not only some typical ways of using writing to frame units of work but also differences reflecting the main focus of work ("people" or "things") and overall…

This is a qualitative case study of two students' composing processes as they developed a documentary video about the Dominican Republic in an urban, public middle school classroom. While using a digital video editing program, the students moved across multiple media (the Web, digital video, books, and writing), drawing semiotic resources from…

Young children are growing up in a time when literacy practices and textual productions are in flux. Yet literacy curricula, particularly for those deemed "at risk," are tightly focused on the written language "basics." What are the potential consequences? In this article, the author considers this question, drawing on an ethnographic study of…

Researchers studying technology development often examine how rhetorical activity contributes to technologies' design, implementation, and stabilization. This article offers a possible methodology for studying one role of rhetorical activity in technology development: knowledge consolidation analysis. Applying this method to an exemplar case, the…

This research analyzed the composing processes of one high school student as she designed the interiors of homes for a course in interior design. Data included field notes, an interview with the teacher, artifacts from the class, and the focal student's concurrent and retrospective protocols in relation to her design of home interiors. The…

The introduction of seminars to university teaching marks the onset of a new teaching philosophy and practice in which writing is used to make students independent learners and researchers. Although the beginnings of writing pedagogy at American universities are well documented, little is known about its origins in Germany. The article tracks the…

This article presents findings from case studies of two Latina bilingual high school writers engaged in a year-long research and writing project. Both young women demonstrated unique patterns related to their approaches to inquiry and performance of literacy practices. By using an ecological framework to integrate a multiple literacies perspective…