English Journal - Volume 107, Issue 3, 2018

This piece explores how moving from grammar instruction to language study empowers students and their writing. The authors detail how to leverage what students already know and how certain language moves negotiate power.

The author advocates for increased attention to sensory-based writing, arguing that increased awareness of the sensuous leads to a richer life. A writing exercise for each of the five senses is included.

Four English language arts teachers formed an inquiry group to design approaches to writing assessment that would support and foster student writers’ agency, empowerment, and freedom.

The authors examine photovoice projects created by students and teacher candidates who explored issues of gender in response to a young adult novel and co-researched that process.

This article focuses on how adolescent writers took up an invitation to write and share a piece of work in school that wasn’t tied to a grade. Students’ responses to this invitation are examined in an effort to revise some of the typical approaches to teaching writing.

This article examines the power of composing images as students construct identities and shape their own worlds. It illustrates student empowerment through agency, intellectual engagement, and community investment and suggests that composing with images forms a bridge back to alphabetic-centric composing.

This article illustrates an enactment of culturally sustaining writing pedagogy through composing, performing, and responding to spoken word poetry.

How can we make writing instruction more relevant to the writing all students will use on the job— not just college-bound students? This article proposes technical writing components to help prepare students to write for audiences beyond the classroom.

This article explores how Aristotle’s enthymeme can serve as an effective prewriting tool for literary analysis in the high school classroom. By foregrounding audience and purpose, the enthymeme clarifies for students their necessary content and options for organizing their ideas.

Revision is arguably the heart of the writing process, but teachers and students may sidestep the complexities in favor of the quick finish. By surfacing the classroom ecologies and practices involved in supporting student writers, the authors discover revision as a site for the development of agency.

Thomas Nunnally equates five-paragraph format essays with square cucumbers found at farmer’s markets: they have an established structure but no argument. The real square cucumbers are students who need a formula to write competently.

ELA classrooms are uniquely positioned to teach students the value of informed citizenship and compelling argument.

This piece narrates the year-long journey of students who successfully responded in a variety of genres to a statewide writing test that traditionally calls for nonfictional prose essays.

This article explains the many advantages of Digital Video (DV) Assessments, student DV portfolios, and student DV introductions. It provides a pedagogical and humanitarian rationale for such practices and offers some unexpected results, such as unique and improved teacher-to-student rapport.