Melanie Sperling

Revisiting the Writing-Speaking Connection: Challenges for Research on Writing and Writing Instruction

Both research in the field of writing and writing pedagogy have been built to a large extent on the premise that, as a fundamental discourse process, writing has critical connections to speaking. What those connections are has been debated by both researchers and teachers. This article reviews writing research that implicates writing-speaking relationships by constructing two contrasting positions for organizing the research and understanding the relationships: (a) that writing differs from speaking, and (b) that writing is similar to speaking. Research issues regarding integrating these positions are raised, and on the basis of the review a guideline is offered for future writing research, implicating the field of writing in concerns about teaching and learning in different academic and sociocultural contexts.

English Education Research and Classroom Practice: New Directions for New Times

In exploring the role of research in the secondary school subject traditionally known as “English,” we address a host of issues crowded with problems and potentials. Surely the perennially debated contours of the field have never been more in question, as new technologies and transforming patterns of civic, workplace, and global communication challenge us to enlarge our notions of what is truly basic in concert with the myriad opportunities, dangers, and complexities of today’s world (Luke, 2004a, 2004b). As those who teach the secondary subject and who provide teachers’ professional preparation, English educators are positioned to serve as critical mediators of these new challenges. This is admittedly no easy undertaking, as academics’ ongoing efforts to build ever-richer conceptions of literacy remain markedly at odds with the determined emphasis on basic skills both reflected in and reified by the No Child Left Behind initiative in the United States (U.S. Department of Education [USDOE], 2007). English educators therefore face the formidable task of negotiating between the complex vision of contemporary research and the modernist take on literate competency embedded in recent education policies (Yagelski, 2006), with their concomitant conception of research as “market commodity qua objective product testing and market research” (Luke, 2004a, p. 1427). As U.S. states and districts respond to federal pressure to adopt practices based on “scientific” studies (USDOE, 2007), English educators are endeavoring to foster appreciation of the broader intellectual traditions that have shaped understandings of the high school subject through the years—including not only the social sciences but also literary studies, philosophy, and the arts (National Council of Teachers of English [NCTE], 2007; see also the American Educational Research Association [AERA] Task