Teaching Writing Through Content: Six Instructional Activities to Improve Students’ Sentence-Level Writing Skills

Writing is a complex activity requiring a wide range of skills. Sentence construction, a foundational writing skill, is necessary for paragraph and composition writing. Unfortunately, many current approaches to teaching writing place a priority on the product—focusing on teaching the process of writing lengthy pieces rather than providing explicit instruction in the development of singular, well-constructed sentences. Many students with learning disabilities struggle with proficient sentence construction and acquiring content-area knowledge. Teaching sentence-level writing through content can aid in remediating sentence-level writing deficits while helping students build content-area knowledge. A framework for embedding writing across the curriculum and six sentence-level instructional activities are described.

Transformative Pedagogy and Student Voice

This paper describes the principles of transformative pedagogy that lead to the development of distinct student voices in academic writing classes. Whether the course is taught at the undergraduate level through research, expository, and argumentative writing assignments or at the graduate level through literature review essays, research articles, and dissertation writing tasks, students need to be able to develop their voices and make their contributions to knowledge. Correspondingly, professional writing teachers need to teach students how to write voiced project documents such that it has the student’s unique signature even when situated within a paradigmatic boundary. The article expands on how facilitators of academic writing courses can incorporate S.E.A. principles of scaffolding, empowerment, and awareness as triple enablers into their teaching methodologies in order to develop student voices and usher in transformation successfully. As one of the few articles to examine how graduate and undergraduate academic writing instruction, including W.A.C. (Writing Across the Curriculum) and W.I.D. (Writing in the Discipline) teaching, can be recast to develop student voices, the paper can be helpful to readers looking for resources and recommendations to incorporate transformative pedagogy into their teaching.