Carolyn L. Piazza

Development and Validation of a Writing Dispositions Scale for Elementary and Middle School Students

The authors report the development and validation of the Writing Dispositions Scale (WDS), a self-report instrument for measuring affective stances toward writing. The authors collected survey data from 854 elementary and middle school students and randomly split the data to facilitate both an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The findings of the EFA demonstrated that an 11-item WDS has desirable internal and content reliability and discriminant validity. The CFA supported the item selection of the EFA and demonstrated excellent factorial validity and reliability. The analyses confirmed that writing dispositions are related to 3 affective stances: confidence, persistence, and passion toward writing.

Multiple Forms of Literacy: Teaching Literacy and the Arts.

1. Introduction: The Literacies. 2. Art Literacy: Visualizing Language. 3. Music Literacy: Listening to Language. 4. Dance Literacy: Communicating Nonverbally. 5. Theater Literacy: Performing Language. 6. Film Literacy: Imaging Language. Appendix A: Multiple Intelligences. Appendix B: National Standards for Literacy and the Arts. Index.

Identifying Context Variables in Research on Writing A Review and Suggested Directions

This article identifies context variables in written composition from theoretical perspectives in cognitive psychology, sociology, and anthropology. It also shows how multiple views of context from across the disciplines can build toward a broader definition of writing. The article is divided into two sections. First is a discussion of different perspectives and definitions of context from across three disciplines. Second is a proposal for considering complimentary views of context as a framework for studying young childrens language and literacy development. Multidiscipline perspectives of context can provide new directions for writing research and can lead to a richer, fuller view of writing as thinking, as language, as a social event, and as a reflection of culture.

“My heart want to say something”: exploring ELL vocabulary use through e‐mail

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on one high school English‐language‐learners (ELL) breadth and depth of vocabulary as he communicated with his teacher through e‐mail across geographic boundaries for over 18 months.Design/methodology/approach – The authors began by separating 358 e‐mails into three time periods (first beginning, second middle, and third end) to calculate breadth using lexical density (type‐token ratios). Then, we sampled e‐mails based on personal and impersonal topics within these time periods and linguistically analyzed them for lexical cohesion, semantic usage, and derivational morphology. Interviews with participants before and after the analysis served as member checks.Findings – The quantitative results showed a steady improvement in the breadth of the students vocabulary over time. Qualitative analyses revealed four major uses of vocabulary within the context of e‐mail and the teacher‐student relationship.Practical implications – Given our findings, we offer educat...

Perspectives on Production of Written Educational Policy Reports.

The aim of this article is to relate language research to policy work, a relationship that has been implicitly recognized by educational researchers in their attempts to address unresolved issues in the production and utilization of written policy reports. A number of US educational policy researchers have attempted to influence the way in which policy reports can and might be produced by explicating product features that discourse researchers gloss as variability in format/style, scope, medium, and audience. Their attempts to be responsive to the ‘meanings’ of educational policies for diverse targets and interest groups raise difficult questions, including, how we can develop policy products (presentations of words) that take into account variability in oral and written policy arena processes (multiple expectations about style; multiple expectations about ‘valuable’ information; multiple interpretations and meanings of actions). After introducing examples of these calls for attention to product and proce...

Exploring multicultural discourse in information technology documents

Purpose – The primary purpose of this paper is to illustrate strategies college students learn to practice in their analysis of multicultural documents located through use of the internet.Design/methodology/approach – Students explored a variety of meanings for diversity within and across texts readily available in public databases. Using linguistic devices (forms and functions of discourse) as language resources, and following a propositional analytic scheme, students compiled samples of text from online documents.Findings – Evaluation of these compilations at the end of the course demonstrated that students can use conceptualizations of language forms and functions to identify representations of multicultural, and can identify attributions of the phenomenon of diversity using conceptualizations of science as propositional structures.Originality/value – The value of this conceptual paper has been articulated: In what ways can projects that attempt to connect multicultural education and technology facilit...