Bill Grabe outlined twelve ideas for future research in second language/ESL writing during his plenary talk at the Symposium on Second Language Writing today. His list included:

1. The importance of summary writing
2. The importance of exploring lexical, grammatical, and textual features contributing (or not contributing) to writing development
3. The need to move beyond the t-unit as a measure of writing complexity
4. The need to carry out more training studies with larger groups of students—the need to build a repository of controlled results across and within student groups, tasks, and topics
5. The need to build principled and controlled student writing corpora that multiple researchers can access for multiple issues and multiple studies (ICLE is not good enough)
6. The need to carry out (near) replications of highly-cited (and other) studies and have the replications published regularly
7. The need to study in more depth the linkages between vocabulary knowledge (both receptive and productive) and writing abilities
8. The need to study writing variability due to L1 language transfer factors, linguistic or textual
9. The need to expand research on writing assessment practices, particularly in classroom settings, and particularly with respect to “assessment for learning”
10. The need for controlled research on the impact of different media on writing, or using different media as part of writing development
11. The need to expand research on effective ways to carry out teacher training for more effective writing instruction (action research)
12. The need to examine relations between writing abilities (& development) and brain functioning

Admittedly empirically-focused. But thought-provoking. I’m interested, of course, in the implications of #10. What might such research look like? What kinds of questions should we be asking about the impact of different media on writing and writing development? So often administrators still ask whether or not computers are beneficial to students’ language learning and writing development. I’m just not convinced anymore that it’s interesting to ask whether or not the use of computers in the classroom is beneficial to teaching students to write. To me, that’s like asking 50 years ago whether or not it would be beneficial to students’ long-term writing to give them pencils. But what kinds of questions should we ask, especially in relation to L2 writers?

CCCC will be offering childcare for the first time at the convention in San Francisco. The deadline for registration for childcare is January 1st, and at this point nobody has registered yet.
The CCCC officers are concerned that if we don’t have much registration then we will have to withdraw childcare for the convention (and CCCC would still have to pay the down payment to the provider). Please spread the word to folks you think might be interested in this service. The Executive Committee is offering childcare on a pilot basis for this convention, and we’d like to make it as much of a success as possible. Our goal is to have about 20 children registered for each of the 3 days of the convention.

Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for how to advertise this service best, and I’d be happy to pass these along to the EC.

Here is the information from the CCCC website:

“This year we are offering an on-site activity center for childcare, Camp CCCC, during the convention from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday through Saturday right in the Hilton Hotel. Children ages 6 months to 12 years old are welcome. The center, staffed by experienced CPR and Pediatric First Aid certified professionals, will provide age-appropriate entertaining and educational activities, including storytelling, hands-on crafts, games, the “Build It Zone,” and the “Boogie It Zone.” Infant care stations, rest areas, and “SecurChild®” photo check-in and check-out will ensure a safe, secure environment.”

You can register for half-day or full-day care.  Registration deadline is January 1, 2009.  To get more information about facilities and to register for childcare, go to www.accentoca.com/campcccc09

A few folks have written to me asking how to join the Second Language Writing listserv for CCCC (which also includes others interested in L2 writing who are not part of CCCC). If you’d like to join the list, here are the instructions:

1. Send a message to: mj2@lists.ncsu.edu

2. In the text of the message, type: subscribe slw_cccc

3. Note: Do not type anything in the subject line

4. You will receive a message back from the listserv asking you to confirm your subscription to the list

5. When you want to send a message to the list, send it to slw_cccc@lists.ncsu.edu

On May 30th, I attended the North Carolina Scholarship of Teaching and Learning day at UNC-Greensboro with my colleagues Wanda Lloyd and Kate Hagopian. It was a great day to network with people from around the state, and I felt like I had one day that was completely dedicated to thinking about new directions for my own research on teaching and learning. I co-presented on “Going Public with SoTL” with Laura Cruz, from Western Carolina University, and her fabulous slides made me look well-prepared. I don’t mean to be too touchy-feely, but I think that for the first time in the two years I’ve been in NC, I felt like I had found a community of teacher-scholars who spoke my language. AND, I felt like we discovered a community that could be a catalyst for designing some innovative initiatives in our writing program at NC State. One idea I had: a mini-fellowship for lecturers in the writing program based on the Carnegie Scholars and Maricopa Institute for Learning models. What do you think?

Attending the conference also raised my awareness about several other opportunities around the state that will be coming up soon for those interested in professional development. The Carolinas Writing Program Administrators will be holding their annual conference in September in Little Switzerland, NC. The North Carolina English Teachers Association will host their annual conference in Winston-Salem in October, and UNC-Greensboro will hold the Lilly Conference on College and University Teaching in February, 2009. I also can’t resist plugging the first North Carolina Symposium on Teaching Writing that we’ll be hosting at NC State October 17 and 18 of this year. More info soon!

I just got back from CCCC in New Orleans, and it was a fabulous conference–and a great location! Some of the highlights of the conference for me were:

• Chairing a terrific panel on plagiarism for my colleagues, whose talks were featured in Inside Higher Ed the following Monday
• Presenting on a panel with Dana Ferris and Gail Shuck, who shared some great strategies for working with L2 writers
• Facilitating a workshop on plagiarism and L2 writers with Rebecca Moore Howard
• Celebrating Sharon Crowley’s book award and (well-deserved!) retirement
• Sharing the plane to and from New Orleans and the taxi from the airport with a crazy bunch of folks from East Carolina
• Dinner at Broussard’s
• The view from the top floor of the Loews Hotel
• Realizing that I really only need to travel with my Blackberry…and I’m annoyingly addicted to checking it

Can’t wait until next year in San Francisco!

I presented at the Carolinas Writing Program Administrators’ meeting in Charlotte last Friday with my good friend, Tony Atkins. (We were also scheduled to present with Paula Rosinski, but her baby is due any day now and she was ordered by her doctor to stay close to home. We missed you, Paula!) Tony and I talked about using new media for teaching writing–Tony focused on visual arguments and using Facebook, and I talked about using new media to help students conduct research (drawing on much of the work I’ve been doing with Shelley Rodrigo that is posted on this month’s Teaching Composition blog).

Tony’s resource website for his talk includes some wonderful assignments for video composition and some great resources for incorporating multimedia into a writing classroom. Great stuff!