This article explores the writing and reading requirements of the literacy practices, events, and texts characteristic of work mediated by the online labor platforms of the gig economy, such as Airtasker and Freelancer, which bring together people needing a job done with those willing to do it. These emerging platform-based discourse communities…

This article follows the academic literacy learning trajectory of Farah, an undergraduate anthropology major at the American University in Cairo. In charting her path from the Egyptian public schooling system to a Western-based transnational university, this study offers a perspective in which a writer created and navigated a challenging…

Factual writing is a key macrogenre of American K-12 schooling that is also valued in workplace and society. This study examined the genre and register features of two subgenres of factual writing--biography and report--composed by 48 sixth-grade students in a curriculum unit on scientists and science-related careers aimed at developing students'…

Although community colleges are important entry points into higher education for many American students, few studies have investigated how community college students engage with different genres or develop genre knowledge. Even fewer have connected students' genre knowledge to their academic performance. The present article discusses how 104…

Source-based writing is a common but difficult task in history and philosophy. Students are usually taught how to write a good text in language classes. However, it is also important to address discipline-specificity in writing, a topic likely to be taught by content teachers. In order to design discipline-specific writing instruction, research…

Language learning is context-dependent and requires learners to employ different sets of language skills to fulfill various tasks. Yet standardized English as a foreign language assessments tend to conceptualize English proficiency as a unidimensional construct. In order to distinguish English proficiency as separate context-driven constructs, I…

This article examines the impact of the sociodemographic profile (including age, gender, and educational track) of Flemish adolescents (aged 13-20) on lexical aspects of their informal online discourse. The focus on lexical and more "traditional," print-based aspects of literacy is meant to complement previous research on sociolinguistic…

Using a mixed-methods, multi-institutional design of general education writing courses at four institutions, this study examined genre as a key factor for understanding and promoting writing development. It thus aims to provide empirical validation of decades of theoretical work on and qualitative studies of genre and the nature of genre…

In this essay, we map out four major approaches to the study of writing experiences: (a) worlds apart, (b) literacy in the wild, (c) ecologies and networks, and (d) transfer. We examine how the primary metaphors used in each approach have contributed to our field's understanding of writing. In focusing on specific dimensions of writing, each…

Views about what writing is and how it should be taught have varied over the years as well as across contexts. Studies of curricula, teaching materials, and teaching practices have shown a strong focus on skills, genres, and processes, but few have asked teachers about their perspectives on writing. In this article we explore what views, or…

This study examined multiple measures of written expression as predictors of narrative writing performance for 362 students in grades 4 through 6. Each student wrote a fictional narrative in response to a title prompt that was evaluated using a levels of language framework targeting productivity, accuracy, and complexity at the word, sentence, and…

Negotiating membership within a disciplinary community is as much an exercise in rhetorical facility as it is content expertise. Where individuals reside in the hierarchy of membership is determined by not only what they talk and write about, but how. Yet, there are many factors that can impact newcomers' acculturation into a disciplinary…

This study aims to explore the process of reading during writing. More specifically, it investigates whether a combination of keystroke logging data and eye tracking data yields a better understanding of cognitive processes underlying fluent and nonfluent text production. First, a technical procedure describes how writing process data from the…

A growing body of scholarship in the field of writing research from a cognitive perspective suggests that girls tend to outperform boys in particular writing tasks. Still, our understanding about gender differences continues to evolve. The present study specifically focused on gender differences in writing between students from Grade 4 to Grade 9.…

It is established that transcription skills (handwriting and spelling) constrain children's writing. Yet, little is known about the mechanism underlying this relationship. This study examined the mediating role of bursts and pauses on the link between transcription skills and writing fluency or text quality. For that, 174 second graders did the…