ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the writing practices and achievement of students in the ALTUR project, paralleling the analysis of their reading in Chapter 5. As with reading in Chapter 5, we describe here the students’ writing practices and achievements along with the content and contexts of their writing, their approaches to composing, the diffi culties they reported facing and ways of addressing them, and the qualities of compositions they produced. These analyses have synthesized data sources (described in Chapter 1) for the 18 students whose assessment data were judged reliable: checklists of routine writing practices, stimulated recall protocols of recent writing tasks, and formal composition assessments-each administered near the start and end of the school year. The fi ndings from this chapter are interpreted in Chapter 10 in relation to the overall question guiding the ALTUR project: What factors, challenges, and contexts contribute to and constrain literacy achievement among at-risk adolescent learners with culturally diverse backgrounds?
