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This comparative study aims to investigate the rhetorical organization of Korean and English argumentative texts. In previous studies, the rhetorical organization of such texts has been categorized as either direct or indirect depending on the placement of the thesis statement (Chien, 2011). The present study attempts to document more specific rhetorical patterns using Swales (1990) concept of moves and steps.

Ten Korean EFL students with similar L1 and L2 literacy backgrounds were selected, and, adopting a within-subject design, the students wrote two argumentative essays, one in Korean and one in English, in response to two different topics. The students’ essays were analyzed at both the macro and micro levels. The focus of the macro-level analysis was on the placement of the thesis statement and of topic sentences in each of the body paragraphs. Once the macro-level analysis was done, the essays were analyzed at the micro level using Swales (1990) move analysis.

The findings suggest that both texts were organized in a similar way at the macro level, constituting a typical paper structure (i.e. introduction, body and conclusion). However, a difference appears at the micro level: the students used a variety of steps to create a move when writing in Korean, whereas little variation was found in the English texts. An analysis of the data suggests the possibility that the standardized moves and steps in the English texts may be due not to culture-specific rhetoric, but to a lack of practice with rhetorical thinking in English.

In previous studies, the rhetorical organization of texts has been categorized as either direct or indirect depending on the placement of the thesis statement. The present study uses the framework of move analysis to describe more specific organizational patterns of Korean and English writing to determine the extent to which Korean and English writing is similar in the genre of argumentative writing. Another significance of the study lies in the choice of Korean writing as a reference point for comparison with English writing. It has been widely noted that there is a dearth of research of Korean students’ writing in contrastive rhetoric. To the best of the author’s knowledge, most of the contrastive rhetoric studies were conducted with Chinese or Japanese student writers.

This paper aims to investigate adolescent English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ digitally mediated multimodal compositions across different genres of writing.

Three Korean high school students participated in the study and created multiple multimodal texts over the course of one academic semester. These texts and other materials were the basis for this study’s qualitative case studies. Multiple sources of data (e.g. class observations, demographic surveys, interviews, field notes and students’ artifacts) were collected. Drawing upon the inductive approach, a coding-oriented analysis was used for the collected data. In addition, a multimodal text analysis was conducted for the students’ multimodal texts and their storyboards.

The study participants’ perceptions of multimodal composing practices seemed to be positively reshaped as a result of them creating multimodal texts. Some participants created multimodal products in phases (e.g. selecting or changing a topic, constructing a storyboard and editing). Especially, although the students’ creative processes had a similarly fixed and linear flow from print-based writing to other modalities, their creative processes proved to be flexible, recursive and/or circular.

This study contributes to the understanding of adolescent English language learners’ multimodal composing practices in the EFL context, which has been underexplored in the literature. It also presents the students’ perspectives on these practices. In short, it provides theoretical and methodological grounds for future L2 literacy researchers to conduct empirical studies on multimodal composing practices.

The purpose of the study is to look at Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ organizational strategy use in English writing at universities in Taiwan. One significant area that has been indicated in contrastive rhetoric studies spins around the notion of culturally constructed organizational patterns. It is claimed that second language (L2) writers may have implicit culturally driven presuppositions and values about academic writing in the first language (L1) that may transfer straightforwardly to academic writing in English.

Data were from 50 high- and 50 low-achieving EFL students’ and 50 native English speakers’ (NESs’) written texts, and semi-structured interviews with EFL students and their teachers.

Based on text analysis, when high-achieving EFL students and NESs were compared, they were similar in location of thesis, existence of introduction, existence of topic sentences, macro-level patterns, existence of conclusion, existence of a concluding sentence and existence of a final comment, but different in existence of background information. Nonetheless, it is noted that low-achieving EFL students were quite different from high-achieving EFL students and NESs in several aspects, such as location of thesis, existence of introduction, existence of topic sentences, macro-level patterns, existence of conclusion, existence of a concluding sentence, and existence of a final comment. In addition, the written texts and interview findings suggest that while cultural differences do, in fact, exist, Chinese writers’ English organizational strategy use were to some extent intertwined with their writing experiences and teachers’ writing instructions. The results also suggest the flexibility of writers and multiplicity of writing experiences within a cultural group.

The study makes original recommendations for language pedagogy.

This paper aims to examine two teachers’ beliefs and practices on teaching writing at an urban, high-performing middle school to determine: What discourses of writing are being taught in an urban, high-performing US public middle school? What factors prevent or enable particular discourses?

Drawing on case study methods, this study uses a single-case design with two seventh-grade teachers at a high-performing urban school as embedded units of analysis. Data collection took place over one semester. Data sources included observations and interviews with the two teachers, an interview with an administrator and multiple instructional artifacts, including unit and lesson plans. Observational data were analyzed using a priori code for writing discourses (Ivanic, 2004) and interview data were analyzed for factors affecting instruction using open, axial and selective coding.

Both teachers enacted extended multi-discourse writing instruction integrating skills, creativity, process, genre and social practices discourses supported by their beliefs and experience; colleagues; students’ relatively high test scores; and relative curricular freedom. However, there was minimal evidence of a sociopolitical discourse aligned with critical literacy practices. Limits to the sociopolitical discourse included a lack of a social justice orientation, an influx of low-performing students, a focus on raising test scores, data-focused professional development and district pacing guides. Racism is also considered as an underlying structural factor undermining the sociopolitical discourse.

Although generalizability is limited because of the small sample size and the unique context of this study, two major implications are the need to layer discourses in writing instruction while centering critical pedagogy and develop teacher beliefs and knowledge. To support these two implications, this study suggests developing university-school partnerships and professional development opportunities that create a community of practice around comprehensive writing instruction. Future research will involve continuing to work with the participants in this study and documenting the effects of providing theory and tools for integrating the sociopolitical discourse into middle school curricula and instruction.

This study contributes to the field of literacy education’s understanding of internal and external factors limiting the sociopolitical discourse in a high-performing, urban middle school in the USA, an understudied context.

This paper aims to apply ecological models of agency to understand factors influencing how an eighth grade English language arts (ELA) teacher enacted agency in four moments in the classroom. It focuses on how his language in relation to his instructional choices reflected messaging to his students regarding the learning he intended from his ELA instruction.

The paper applies an existing framework (Biesta et al., 2015, 2017), adding Bakhtin (1981) understandings of language, to classroom discourse supplemented by teacher interviews and other data sources. In looking across these data sources, the paper traces the influence of past factors (i.e. the teacher’s personal and professional history) and future orientations (i.e. goals established in standards and the teacher’s goals for his students) on present instructional decisions. The teacher’s language in the classroom becomes a primary focus for this study, as it reveals the ways in which he drew on specific resources in the messages in his instruction.

In each moment, the teacher’s language could be shown to have motivation in a variety of factors. While influenced by external factors such as the common core standards and standardized assessments, the teacher often enacted agency out of his personal beliefs about making learning personally meaningful for students as grounded in his personal and professional history. Exceptions to this pattern, especially regarding preparing students for writing tests on state assessments, less frequently relied on the language of finding meaning in the learning.

This paper builds on studies of ELA teacher agency through the development of methodology related to an ecological model of agency and Bakhtinian concepts of language focused on the discourse of the classroom. It contributes to understanding the factors at study in an ELA teacher’s instructional agency, which can help teachers and researchers further develop frameworks for describing and assessing the practice of agency in the profession.

Many states are restructuring their US history state assessments to include written-response assessment items that evaluate students' literacy skills in high-stakes environments. The purpose of this study was to investigate how the addition of an extended-response item to a US history state assessment was associated with an increase in the racial achievement gap.

The theoretical framework included linguistic complexity of standardized assessment items and academic language demand and utilized a difference-in-difference research design.

The findings indicate that the achievement gap between students of color and White students increased when an extended-response assessment item was added to an exclusively multiple-choice item exam and that this increase in the achievement gap may be contributed to a literacy gap.

The continued investigation of how students of color perform on different types of extended-response standardized assessment items. And, the continued investigation of evidenced-based instructional practices that focus on developing students' literacy skills in US history as well as culturally responsive instructional practices.

The knowledge and implementation of literacy instruction and culturally responsive instruction in US history classrooms as well as in preservice teacher education programs and in-service professional development programs.

The current study is one of the first large-scale investigations into the racial achievement gap on US history written-response standardized assessment items and in identifying a literacy gap between students of color and White students on US history written-response state assessment items.

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate for social studies teachers and teacher educators the ways in which students' disciplinary writing is scaffolded within the context of the inquiry design model; trends in such scaffolding are called “the learner's pathway,” since it leads students to more abstract levels of historical argumentation. The author argues that engaging historical writing genres is a necessary component of historical thinking and that understanding the ways that teachers support students' historical writing capacities can help them to make more intentional choices when building inquiries.

To study genre-related scaffolding across inquiries, this study draws on systemic functional linguistics (SFL)-based genre theory as an analytical structure and seventy-four history-focused secondary social studies inquiries to determine any patterns in the ways that teachers scaffold students' writing genres through an inquiry.

Findings suggest that there is a learner's pathway that teachers use to develop students' argumentative writing capacities; however, there is also evidence to suggest that notetaking and source synthesis are not valued instructional products, limiting the potential impact of historical thinking work within the inquiry process.

The existence of this learner's pathway has implications for the ways that teachers and preservice teachers can be professionally developed to leverage this pathway. Rather than the often-used methods of support students' generic writing capacities, professional development should focus on the ways social studies teachers can guide students to more abstract reasoning through their writing. This study's findings also have implications for the ways that social studies teachers assess students' summative arguments. Assessment practices should focus on the genre-features of “argument” rather than just the stages of the argumentative essay.

This piece is original because genre-based research is missing from much of the social studies education research. This study's findings present an additional paradigm through which social studies teachers and teacher leaders can explore the purposes of historical writing tasks and assessment.

This study was conducted in ninth- and tenth-grade classrooms with the goal of studying effective scaffolding for improving argumentative writing, both conventional and digital/multimodal.

The author conducted a formative experiment in two high-school classrooms to study ways teachers integrated forms of multimodal composition in their classrooms and provided associated scaffolding.

Findings regarding scaffolding included the embedding of scaffolding in the writing process to blend conventional and digital forms, the use of collaboration as a needed, though resisted, part of this scaffolding, and the consideration of digital tools that mediate students’ argumentative writing.

This study explored the implementation of a multimodal literacies intervention, providing empirical findings to a field that has remained largely theoretical.

The lesson study aims to examine college English teachers' growth in technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) and the improvement of students' learning outcomes in the context of MOOC-based and AI-powered flipped teaching and assessment of EFL writing (MAFTA).

Three college EFL teachers and their students (66 in total) participated in three cycles of MAFTA instruction. Triangulated analysis was conducted by considering all relevant data sources, including the teachers' discussions and reflections, the argumentative essays produced by the students before and after the MAFTA instruction, as well as the data gathered through questionnaires and interviews.

The three teachers demonstrated varying degrees of growth in TPACK, as evidenced by their increased knowledge of the technology tools and skills in utilizing the tools to realize their pedagogical beliefs on teaching EFL writing. Substantial improvements were detected in students' essays. The students generally have affirmative perceptions on the MAFTA model and the questionnaire and interviews specified the benefits they gained from each stage of the model.

Firstly, the lesson study is grounded in an innovative approach to teaching EFL writing that incorporates multiple technological affordances. Secondly, it closely scrutinizes the dynamics of both teachers' and students' growths during the innovative practice. The findings could offer insights into teachers' TPACK development and effective integration of technological advancements in EFL education at the tertiary level.

Focuses on the relative underachievement of First Class degrees by women in the UK compared to men. Cites problem areas as history, sociology, and english. Attempts to test a hypothesis that this is due to inequality in assessment with graduate writing styles labelled as “gendered”. Presents findings which suggest the above to be the case, with male academic styles tending to be bold, confident and risk‐taking and female styles perceived as cautious and conscientious. Argues that the effects are seen in “argument‐based” subjects rather than “fact based” subjects.