Writing and Its Development across Lifespans and in Transnational Contexts

With this issue, we come full circle in a volume year that has presented new research on practices of teaching and learning the four traditional English language arts: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Perhaps more importantly, the articles illuminate how language and grammatical instruction do still matter enormously to learners, scholars, and future teachers of English, despite the evidence derived from an influential set of meta-analyses of research on writing instruction that grammar instruction simply doesn't work when it comes to improving students' writing (e.g., Graham & Perin, 2007; Hillocks, 1986). Brown and Aull lead the issue with an article exploring the syntactic patterns that distinguish higher- and lower-scoring Advanced Placement (AP) exams in a corpus of essays drawn from a pool of US students transitioning into postsecondary education. (More on that point below.) Along the way, the articles offer cutting-edge methodologies and creative research designs to analyze student writing and to test the effectiveness of instructional interventions in the teaching of language in first-year writing courses and in TESOL. In this way, the study has potential to enrich practitioner work, suggesting how English language arts teachers might offer students rhetorical approaches to succeeding at highstakes writing tasks (e.g., Gere, Christenbury, & Sassi, 2005). The explicit focus on register awareness Costa and held at Michigan State University in April 2016. Because of the editorial conflict of interest, RTE editorial board member and former editor Professor Paul Prior generously served as guest editor. The language aspect of the English language arts...