Curricula are an important but neglected part of the context of writing instruction; they mediate between policies, instructional practices, and student learning. Acknowledging the key role of teachers in interpreting and implementing curricula, we examine structural and contextual conditions that impact their agency in the “curriculum work” they do. Drawing on our international online survey of experts’ ( N = 46) views of writing curricula, we note teachers’ role in development; the nature of writing curricula and where it is located; teacher agency and the support they receive, for interpretation and implementation; and the resulting perceived degree of alignment of enactment with the official curriculum. Teachers’ role in the development of writing curricula is largely indirect, through consultation or participation of a small, selected number. Teachers are seen to have considerable agency in implementation; more than half of our respondents considered teachers had a fair amount or a great deal of autonomy. While responses suggest that a majority of curricula are relatively rich in terms of the theoretical perspectives they represent, some are narrow, and the coherence of others, with multiple perspectives, is questioned. Importantly, teachers reportedly receive limited support for implementation, while two thirds of our respondents considered teachers received only a small amount of preparation to teach writing. The data reinforce the need for the provision of quality, relevant resources, and opportunities for professional learning to support ongoing curriculum work of teachers in interpretation and implementation.

Students are usually expected to write full texts in English as a foreign language (EFL) at the end of secondary education. However, research on EFL writing at school is scarce, especially regarding less proficient writers, and seldom focuses on deep-level text features such as structure and coherence. Based on a sample of 166 EFL students in Year 9 attending German middle and lower performance track schools, this study examined 326 narrative and argumentative texts. First, we assessed structure and coherence via analytic ratings using detailed rubrics to gain insights into possible challenges for students. Our analysis showed that relevant text parts (such as the conclusion) were mostly missing and that students struggled to establish a broad common thread with argumentative texts being overall less structured and coherent than narrative texts. Second, we used the software Comproved® to conduct holistic ratings of overall text quality and compared them with our analytic ratings. Large correlations between both ratings suggest that structure and coherence are important aspects of text quality. We discuss how our rubrics can serve as a useful tool for assessment for learning and assist less proficient writers in establishing deep-level features in their texts.

In this introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Writing Research, we review four decades of research, bringing writing to the forefront in conversations devoted to gender and literacy. We identify the impetus for much of the research on gender and writing and situate the four articles in this special issue within three themes: gender patterns in what and how students write, cognitive and socio-cultural factors influencing gender differences in student writing, and attempts to provide alternatives to stereotypical gender patterns in student writing. These interdisciplinary themes, further developed within the four articles, underscore the need to consider gender as a complex social, cognitive and linguistic characteristic of both reading and writing.