Preparing Preservice Teachers to Become Teachers of Writing: A 20-Year Review of the Research Literature

Abstract

University teacher education programs are the “foremost settings for learning how to teach” (Smagorinsky et al., 2003). Yet, how to prepare preservice teachers to teach writing has received little attention from literacy researchers. Despite research reviews for reading teacher research, currently one does not exist for writing teacher education. This article attempts to address this gap by presenting a 20-year literature review (1990–2010) of peer-reviewed studies focused on preparing preservice teachers to teach writing.