Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Interaction And Participation In The Small Group Writing Conference, Chun-Chun Yeh

Journal of Response to Writing

Previous research has established the importance of giving and receiving feedback in students’ writing development. In the present paper, I investigate a less widely studied approach to providing feedback—the small group writing conference, which is attended by a number of students (usually four) and led by the teacher to discuss student drafts. Adapting a framework outlined in a previous study (Ching, 2014), I analyzed the interactions or relationships at work in two group conferences in an EFL (English as a foreign language) context. Findings revealed that the instructor was involved in four-fifths of all interactions, suggesting that the instructor played …

A Comparison Of L1 And Esl Written Feedback Preferences: Pedagogical Applications And Theoretical Implications, Tyler Carter, Suthathip Thirakunkovit

Journal of Response to Writing

This study explores the perceptions of first-year composition (FYC) students toward written teacher feedback and compares the preferences of L1 English and international ESL writers. We used an online questionnaire to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. The first part of the questionnaire consists of 43 Likert items regarding teacher feedback in the context of a selected argumentative essay, and the second part consists of two open-ended questions regarding students’ opinions on teacher feedback. A total of 345 FYC students participated in the study. Our results show that both L1 and ESL writers prefer feedback that offers directions for improvement …

Editorial Introduction, Betsy Gilliland, Grant Eckstein

Journal of Response to Writing

As we enter a new academic year in North American universities, we continue to think about the many ways that teachers, learners, and other writers respond to written texts. While JRW publishes primarily research looking at academic writing, mostly done in institutions of higher education and with courses that specifically teach students how to write, we are also interested in the ways that people (or computers) respond to writing in many other contexts and for many diverse purposes. We welcome manuscripts that consider writing done by professionals in the workplace, writing in graduate science courses, writing for publication, fiction-writing groups, …

Responding To Grammar: An Analysis Of Writing-Teacher Preparation Materials, Daliborka C. Padon

Journal of Response to Writing

The purpose of the present study is to examine the resources for responding to grammatical issues in student writing that are available to writing teachers. The study analyzes two sets of data: (a) the position statements issued by the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the Council of Writing Program Administrators, and the National Council of Teachers of English, and (b) the best-selling writing-teacher preparation materials. The results are discussed through the theoretical lens of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) in order to portray how the field of composition studies—as a community of practice— models responding to linguistically diverse students, …

Creating Space For Student Engagement With Revision: An Example Of A Feedback-Rich Class For Second-Language Writers, Kyung Min Kim

Journal of Response to Writing

Given that feedback from different sources is combined to ripple through the entire revision process, it is important to create a space where students can understand and interact with different modes of feedback in order to work through it. However, pedagogy for the use of multiple feedback sources from a practitioner’s perspective has been rare. To address this paucity of attention, this teaching article suggests a feedback-rich framework to help students grow as independent writers who can navigate the various interactional spaces for their writing and presents a narrative example of a feedback-rich environment for an ESL first-year composition class. …

Those They Left Behind, Chad M. Orton

BYU Studies

In September 1900, thirty-three-year-old Mary Bennion bid goodbye to her husband, William, as he left to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Southwestern States Mission. Mary, pregnant with the couple’s seventh child, stoically noted his departure in her journal: “Wm left about 11 Oclock. We all feel very sad about his leaving us for such a long time, it looks a long time to be away from his family, but hope he will fulfill an honorable mission, return home a better man than when he left.”¹

The Earth Will Appear As The Garden Of Eden, Terry Ball

BYU Studies

The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden is a collection of essays designed to introduce, review, illustrate, and promote research and scholarship on the environmental history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The book well accomplishes these purposes in an honest and engaging fashion. While essays in edited volumes such as this are often uneven in terms of the quality and the contribution they offer, each piece in this work is remarkably well written and significant. As the book’s introduction explains, Latter-day Saint environmental history is a relatively new discipline, ripe with opportunities and avenues …

Simultaneous Oral-Written Feedback Approach (Sowfa): Students’ Preference On Writing Response, Jim Hu

Journal of Response to Writing

This paper reports beliefs and preferences of second-language (L2) students regarding effective writing feedback strategies, especially conferences for oral and written feedback. Guiding the study were these questions: 1) Do L2 university students prefer to receive direct or indirect teacher feedback on written-language problems? 2) Do the students prefer to receive (a) written feedback (WF) only or (b) oral feedback (OF) in one-on-one conferences as well as WF? 3) In the case of 2(b), do the students prefer to receive OF during or after WF? The study employed mixed methods involving quantitative surveys of 30 Canadian university students from two …

Captain Moroni’S Revelation, Duane Boyce

BYU Studies

Moroni reports receiving a revelation in which the Lord told him, “If those whom ye have appointed your governors do not repent of their sins and iniquities, ye shall go up to battle against them” (Alma 60:33). Moroni reports this revelation straightforwardly, but because Pahoran, the chief governor of the Nephites at the time, turns out to be innocent of the charges contained in Moroni’s subsequent epistle and in the revelation itself (see Alma 61), it is easy to think that Moroni’s revelation (or at least his report of it) is mistaken in some way. Indeed, this conclusion would seem …

Into Arabia: Lehi And Sariah’S Escape From Jerusalem, Warren P. Aston

BYU Studies

In his exhaustively reasoned paper “Dating the Departure of Lehi from Jerusalem,” Jeffrey Chadwick moved the discussion of the timing of the Lehite departure significantly further. Those like myself, who have long assumed that the Book of Mormon’s dating for the departure (about six hundred years before Christ’s birth) is simply a round, approximate number, now have additional reasons to see that the dating may, in fact, be literal and that a definitive year for the event might be within reach.

The Use Of Gethsemane By Church Leaders, 1859–2018, John Hilton Iii, Joshua P. Barringer

BYU Studies

Many commentators have noted that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (herein referred to as “the Church”) has a distinctive focus on Gethsemane. For example, Douglas J. Davies has written that the “LDS interpretation of Christ’s garden experience involves a most interesting relocation of the act of atonement within Christian theological accounts that have, traditionally, seen the cross as the prime site of assuming human sin” and that “Mormonism relocates the centre of gravity of Christ’s passion in Gethsemane rather than upon the cross and Calvary.”

Using Science To Answer Questions From Latter-Day Saint History, Ugo A. Perego

BYU Studies

DNA testing has been employed to study the ancestry and posterity of Joseph Smith Jr., founder of the Mormon movement. Thanks to information found on the paternally inherited Y chromosome, for example, researchers have been able to establish a likely Irish origin for the Smith line. Y chromosome testing has also been helpful in resolving a number of paternity cases involving men who were allegedly sons of Joseph through polygamous unions. To date, all of the tests for these candidates have borne negative results.

Forerunner, Merrijane Rice

BYU Studies

As Isaiah foretold, you will be the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Clear a path for the Lord! Level a highway through this wasteland!

Green Things, Sarah Dunster

BYU Studies

Faith, they say, is a seed that grows. It swells, and as a mother I can say that things inside swelling are not always pleasant. But what sort of growing is always pleasant?

January Night, Susan Jeffers

BYU Studies

Once the snow has fallen, moonlight becomes superfluous.

A Preparatory Redemption: Reading Alma 12–13, Charles Harrell

BYU Studies

A Preparatory Redemption: Reading Alma 12–13 is a collection of essays written by eight scholars as part of the summer 2016 Mormon Theology Seminar, hosted by the Maxwell Institute, to explore the theological significance of Alma’s sermon to the people of Ammonihah, in Alma 12:19–13:20. Few passages of scripture have intrigued me over the years as much as these, so I personally looked forward with great anticipation for this volume to be released.

Mary Whitmer And Moroni, Robert T. Pack

BYU Studies

In June 1829, the Peter Whitmer family welcomed Joseph and Emma Smith and Oliver Cowdery to board at their home in Fayette, New York. They had been brought up from Pennsylvania so that Joseph and Oliver could continue the translation and dictation of the Book of Mormon from the golden plates without persecution. The Whitmer family was then living in a small rural log home bursting at the seams with their large family. These three new visitors placed an additional burden upon the mother, Mary Whitmer, who was responsible for their care. Shortly after their arrival, a “strange person” visited …

Your Sister In The Gospel: The Life Of Jane Manning James, A Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon, Carter Charles

BYU Studies

Biographer Quincy D. Newell admits that she approaches the story of Jane Manning James (1820–1908), one of the first black members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “for what it tells us about religion and race in nineteenth-century America” (4–5) and because it is a “history of Mormonism from below” (135). Such a story, she argues, “demonstrates how a focus on temple rituals and priesthood,” though always central to Latter-day Saints, “blinds us to the everyday lived religion of thousands of nineteenth-century Mormons” (135). Beyond participating in the project of recovering the ethnically diverse past of the …

The Lucky, Chelsea Bagley Dyreng

BYU Studies

I heard the rumors.

Something was going around at school. Also at church. They said it attacks like lightning and leaves you feeling like a grenade exploded inside your body. The one mercy of the ordeal is that it lasts for only twenty-four hours.

The New Testament: A Translation For Latter-Day Saints: A Study Bible, Philip L. Barlow

BYU Studies

Thomas Wayment, classics professor at Brigham Young University, has earned a reputation as one of the most capable and reliable Latter-day Saint scholars of the New Testament and the ancient classical world in which Christianity arose. Educated at the Claremont Graduate School of Religion, Wayment generally addresses Latter-day Saint audiences, whose faith he shares. His writing includes credible work on New Testament manuscript traditions, Joseph Smith’s translation of the Bible, and the historical lives of Jesus and Paul. Wayment has now accomplished his most ambitious project to date: a fresh translation, based on the best available Greek manuscripts, of the …

Bible Culture And Authority In The Early United States, Kent P. Jackson

BYU Studies

In his introduction to Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States, author Seth Perry of Princeton University writes of “a shared set of symbols, types, behaviors, and vocabulary” that derive from or were influenced by the King James Bible (2). The book discusses the interaction of this shared set with early American society, asserting that the Bible and biblical language were resources that individuals in the nineteenth century used to create legitimacy—that is, authority in their relationships with others. Scripturalization is the term Perry employs to describe how people, language, rhetoric, and other aspects of society obtained …

Lot Smith: Mormon Pioneer And American Frontiersman, Hannah Charlesworth

BYU Studies

This extensive biography of prominent pioneer and Latter-day Saint Lot Smith was written by mother-daughter team Carmen R. Smith and Talana S. Hooper. Both have had previous interest and experience in writing history: Carmen Smith was awarded the Utah Historical Quarterly Editor’s Choice for her 1978 report on the rediscovery of the Mormon Battalion’s Lost Well, and Talana Hooper has published several family histories and compiled and edited a history of the people of Central, Arizona.

Full Issue

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

Life Beyond The Grave: Christian Interfaith Perspectives, Alec Joseph Harding

BYU Studies

As suggested in the title, Life beyond the Graveis a compilation of perspectives about the afterlife from a range of Christian denominations. The book’s contents were taken from a 2016 academic conference hosted at Brigham Young University. Titled “Beyond the Grave: Christian Interfaith Perspectives,” the ecumenical conference was designed to build understanding among Christian groups. Editor Robert L. Millet noted on the conference, “There has been no effort whatsoever to ignore theological differences between the various traditions, nor was it ever expected that a presenter compromise in the slightest what he or she holds to be true. . . …

At Least In Heaven There’S Food., Jared Pearce

BYU Studies

She was building bread when the building was bombed, a fighter jet or gasoline tank, kneaded to a flat cake.

Front Matter

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

End Matter

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

Circumcision In The Old Testament, Ryan J. Wessel

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

It can be awkward to say the word circumcision in the gospel classroom. The problem lies in that many students (and some teachers) know just enough about the physical process of circumcision to make mentioning the topic uncomfortable but not enough of the religious history and symbolic meaning to gain much spiritual insight from classroom time dedicated to the topic. Yet the concept of circumcision is related to many chapters in the Old Testament; it is interwoven into scriptures relating to the Abrahamic covenant, the Exodus from Egypt, the promised land, and teachings of multiple Old Testament prophets.¹ An …

Full Issue

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

No abstract provided.