Special issues

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

Call for Special Issue on
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.

Initial submissions: October 1, 2010
Review completed by: December 1, 2010
Revisions by: February 1, 2010

Guest Editors:Christian Schunn (schunn@pitt.edu)| Kevin Ashley (ashley@pitt.edu)| Ilya Goldin (goldin@pitt.edu) University of Pittsburgh

Call for a special issue on
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

Due date for proposals: August 1, 2010

Proposals will be submitted to a blind review process. Authors of promising proposals will be invited to submit full manuscripts that follow the journal's author guidelines and are approximately 20 single-spaced pages in length. Authors should expect the results of the review by November 30, 2010.

Due date for full manuscripts: March 1, 2011

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.