As part of the Association for Business Communication Student Case Competition, this article features a case study written by ABC member Rachel Dolechek. The case was blind reviewed and selected by the ABC Student Competition Committee. ABC membership utilized the case in their classrooms throughout 2024 and submitted top student examples for the…

As an important instructional affordance, teacher written feedback is widely used in second language (L2) writing contexts. While copious evidence has shown that such a pedagogical practice can facilitate L2 learners' writing performance, especially their writing accuracy, little is known about how novice writing teachers conceptualize and enact…

Creative thinking is sometimes neglected by schools. Introducing philosophy in schools represents a commitment to balancing the development of logical and creative thinking, currently exercised only orally. In the present study, the focus is on writing. Firstly, the value of authentic pupil writings is underscored. The pupils and students studied…

In the context of our work as literacy specialists, we taught teachers to use sentence frames to support ELL students' writing. We then studied the impact of their instruction on students. Our analysis of student writing samples revealed no group wide developmental trends so we posed deeper questions about their work using the data analysis…

Students in upper-level courses are expected to observe disciplinary conventions in writing assignments. Common recommendations for teaching conventions require substantial time for instructor feedback and in-class instruction. As an alternative, we tested the effectiveness of a checklist in improving students' performance of these conventions.…

In educational measurement contexts, essays have been evaluated and formative feedback has been given based on the end product. In this study, we used a large sample collected from middle school students in the United States to investigate the factor structure of the writing process features gathered from keystroke logs and the association of that…

In many cases, teachers shy away from including much writing because of the many hours it requires to read and provide substantial feedback on such papers. Yet writing is widely understood as critically important to learning (Applebee & Langer, 2013; Mayher, 1983; Zinsser, 1989). This article describes a program from the Northwest Arkansas…

This study examined the number of writing samples needed to obtain a reliable estimate of young struggling writers' capabilities. It further assessed if performance in one genre was reflective of performance in other genres for these children. Second- and third-grade students (81 boys, 56 girls), who were identified as struggling writers in need…

The Young Writers Program (YWP) is the latest writing workshop to be developed for the classroom. It challenges students to choose a topic and write a novel-length piece based on that topic, without worrying about spelling or grammar. While the foundation of this philosophy is solid, the support and structure of the Young Writers Program website…

Although instructors express concerns about social work students' writing skills, little research has been conducted. One remedy is a social work-focused writing course. This study assessed a required writing course with a sample of 49 baccalaureate students. From online pre- and posttest surveys, 2 student outcomes improved significantly:…

Many academics speak of a "literacy crisis" when referring to student writing standards, often pointing the finger of blame at an overall increase in social networking. The resulting tendency has been for language teachers in higher education to take a corrective, or even remedial, approach to writing fluency. This paper examines…

In the summer of 2009, this author devised a Saturday program with an emphasis on writing for publication targeting three students as his nucleus. One of the students, Mariano, was the only one of the three to accept the invitation. This was a strong indication of his passion for writing. Thus, three weeks before school began, the author and…

English language learners (ELLs) bring a wealth of knowledge to science classrooms, yet often that knowledge is untapped by traditional instruction and assessment. As classrooms become increasingly diverse, it is critical to recognize the depth of understandings ELLs bring to classrooms to explain the scientific world around them. English language…

Blogs in classrooms represent a new approach to teaching writing that is developing and changing daily. Although some scholarly literature explores the use of blogs in educational settings, the blogs are primarily being used at the secondary and college levels. The purpose of this qualitative case study research was to explore how blogging…

Improvement-oriented feedback has been shown to be more effective at raising writing achievement than simple evaluative feedback. This study investigates whether teachers differ in the feedback they give to weak and strong writers as well as how feedback differs across grades. Interviews were conducted with 15 teachers about the feedback they gave…