Special issues

The Journal of Writing Research welcomes proposals for special issues within the scope of the journal. Please download the procedure sheet.

Special issue: Writing and Translation process research - Bridging the gap
During the past decades, a lot of research on text-production processes has been carried out in the disciplines of writing and translation. Theoretical reflections about both the internal cognitive processes and the external processes of both disciplines have helped understanding how writers and translators work and think from the moment they receive the task till the final text product is reached.
The research which has been carried out in the two fields shows that there is a notion of commonalities between them. Both in the results reached and in the methods applied.
From an ontogenetical perspective, writing and translation share typical features of process organization, such as knowledge acquisition, planning, composition and validation. When taking a close look at the process phases, one finds identical process elements such as the main stages of the processes. From a sociological perspective, both disciplines draw on similar resources and aids and extrinsic motivational cues are similar in both fields.
From a methodological perspective, a number of research methods, such as key-stroke logging, screen capture, eye tracking, verbalization, observation and retrospection, has been applied in both fields in research settings resulting in data sets for both qualitative and quantitative analysis. In spite of these similarities, it still appears that little work has been done at the intersection between the two fields to make these similarities explicit.

In order to close this gap, we invite contributions from the two disciplines that can help enlightening and bridging the overlap and, thus, bridge the gap between them. Contributions can present empirical work and results, conceptual/theoretical analysis or methodological issues.

Extended deadline for papers: 1 December 2011 | Final publication deadline: Summer 2012
Submissions are to be made through the online system for the Journal. Include "Special Issue-Translation" at the front of the paper title.

For more information:
Please contact the guest editors of this special issue: Helle Dam-Jensen or Carmen Heine, Aarhus School of Business, Denmark

Special Issue: Redesigning Peer Review Interactions Using Computer Tools
Peer review has long been a component of writing education, although often informally implemented in classrooms with mixed results. More recently, web technologies have enabled more regular use of formal peer review methods in a broad cross-section of classes across many disciplines. This transition enables computers to play new roles in writing, now supporting the peer review process rather than just the writing process. With new computer tools, for example, the following elements can be changed: how reviewers are matched with authors, how reviewers interact with each other, how reviewers interact with authors, how instructors interact with reviews, how instructors interact with other instructors about writing assignments, and how authors provide feedback on the reviews.
Submissions are to be made through the online system for the Journal. Include "Special Issue-Peer Review" at the front of the paper title.

For more information, please contact the guest editors of this special issue: Christian Schunn | Kevin Ashley | Ilya Goldin - University of Pittsburgh

Special issue: Gender and Writing
You are invited to submit a 1000-word proposal for reports of empirical studies, conceptual papers, review papers, or meta-analyses that approach the topic of gender and writing from a range of disciplines (e.g., social, cognitive, developmental and educational psychology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, learning and teaching, information and communication technology, etc.). Examples of possible themes are:

1. theoretical perspectives in gender in writing research
2. research on gender and writing using a socio-cultural theoretical lens
3. gender comparisons of writing using cognitive and developmental lenses
4. research on gender and writing using applied linguistics lenses
5. gender research with respect to the teaching and assessing of writing
6. gender research on writing using information and communication technology

For more information, please contact the guest editors of this special issue, Judy Parr (University of Auckland | New Zealand) and Shelley Stagg Peterson (University of Toronto | Canada).

Corpus methods are new to the field of L1 writing research and there has been no comprehensive discussion of the work in this area. The aim of this special JoWR issue, therefore, is to bring together teachers and researchers from a myriad of perspectives in an effort to explore the emerging field of corpus-informed L1 writing research.

We invite papers covering a range of related topics, including discussions of the development of large, small, and parallel writing corpora; papers exploring the kinds of questions examined via corpus research (e.g. diction and style, citation practices, usage, stylistic variation and its relationship to author gender, etc.); papers examining corpus methods (e.g. frequency lists, concordancing, examination of sociolinguistic variables, etc.) in the context of L1 writing research; explanations of current and ongoing research; as well as discussions of the critiques surrounding a corpus-informed approach to L1 writing research and the corpus-inclined researcher's response to them. Authors are asked to write papers for a broad audience including readers with little or no corpus study familiarity.