As a vital learning activity in second language (L2) writing classrooms, peer feedback plays a crucial role in improving students' writing skills. However, student reviewers face challenges in providing impactful feedback on peers' essays. Low-quality peer reviews emerge as a persistent problem, adversely affecting the learning effect of peer…

The new "Reading and Writing Standards" for years 1-8 (2009) and the "Literacy Learning Progressions" (2010) are the two documents that have been published to inform the New Zealand national standards in literacy. An earlier draft "Literacy Learning Progressions" document was circulated nationwide in 2007 to allow for…

For many secondary students, writing effectively is the most elusive of the critical literacy skills needed for college and career readiness. And for many teachers, revision is the most difficult part of the writing process to tackle. How can adolescent writers be guided to revisit their work, to identify the weaknesses in their writing drafts,…

Critical analysis of the literacy narrative assignment within the context of the other genres in a basic writing course complicates understandings of the political import of the assignment. While several advocates of the literacy narrative have argued that it has the power of what Jean-François Lyotard has called petits récits, the authors argue…

Students in Honors Physical Geology at Louisiana State University (LSU) participated in instruction in eighth- to ninth-grade geology and geography classes in East Baton Rouge Parish Schools (EBRPS) to help meet community needs. LSU students created instructional materials and reflected on the service activity to gain a deeper understanding of…

A large and growing number of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in the US and around the world have the potential to develop bilingualism and biliteracy if supported in their immediate environment. At the forefront in focusing exclusively on biliteracy development in early childhood across a variety of languages, this…

This article seeks answers to questions, such as how children's writing develops and how young students express themselves in writing at various stages of their development. This article reviews the literature through a wide lens as it examines elementary students' writing and is intended to lead to a more comprehensive understanding of…

Learning to perform academic writing in university content classrooms is a major challenge facing nonnative-English-speaker (NNS) students. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) offers new possibilities for bidirectional peer-to-peer scaffolding in which students interact and negotiate meaning concerning academic writing and thus represents a new…

Writing for publication is not easy, but getting published is an essential part of professional development. Whether a novice or an experienced literacy writer, a K-12 teacher, or a university-level educator, writers will benefit from the insights in this book. The editors have organized the book into four sections that offer guidelines for: (1)…

Computerized writing (the digitized word) may affect the utility and meaning of reading and writing in coming generations. The digitized word poses no threat to the technology of literacy; it merely entrenches literacy further into Western culture by making certain operations faster, easier, repeatable, etc. One significant, positive by-product of…

Recent studies undertaken with sociocultural perspectives on literacy offer a framework through which to explore poetry in youth's lives. This article draws upon works within New Literacy Studies to provide a glimpse of urban high school youth's experiences in a unique program called Poetry for the People (P4P). It identifies some ways in which…

Acquisition of academic literacy is often a difficult process for students, and in South Africa this is compounded by the fact that education for most secondary school pupils takes place in a second language at under-resourced schools. This article describes the scaffolding of an academic literacy course designed for South African students from…

The article reports on findings from a replication of a study of bilingual children's editing and correction strategies. The earlier study analyzed revisions that 2nd, 4th, and 6th graders made to their own compositions, written in Spanish. The present study applied the same procedure and assessment rubric to the first draft of compositions…

Discusses (1) activities that encourage students to use formal vocabulary; (2) the use of computers to motivate remedial readers to write; and (3) a pilot study in which sustained silent reading and writing was used to improve the literacy of seventh and eighth grade remedial students.

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 38 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) how writing centers succeed and fail; (2) the effects of scoring method, topic, and mode on grade 12 students' writing scores; (3) analysis of the peer…