Writing can improve children's speaking, boost their reading comprehension, build their knowledge, and elevate their thinking. However a reason it may be hard to learn is that without explicit writing instruction, children often write the way they speak. From elementary through high school, many children answer questions with little elaboration.…

Large Language Models (LLM) -- powerful algorithms that can generate and transform text -- are set to disrupt language learning education and text-based assessments as they allow for automation of text that can meet certain outcomes of many traditional assessments such as essays. While there is no way to definitively identify text created by this…

The teaching of writing in secondary English subjects in Australia, as in other countries including England and the United States, has become increasingly formulaic. Pedagogies including direct instruction, modelling, scaffolding, and genre-based approaches involve the implementation of formulas for writing sentences, paragraphs, and entire…

Economists largely agree that writing is fundamental to understanding and communicating economics and can serve as an effective way to teach students to "think like economists." However, only a small percentage of programs include writing-intensive courses, a major research paper, or a senior thesis, and even fewer devote class time to…

Written expression is often difficult for students with and without learning disabilities. Research-based strategies to support this essential skill include self-regulated learning strategies, technology, and tools for planning and writing. This article describes a multifaceted technology-based writing intervention with embedded self-regulated…

Teachers of writing have two options available to them when it comes to teaching paragraphing. There are, broadly speaking, either "laissez faire" approaches, or tightly prescriptivist ones. While the latter approaches have, at times, been challenged, they are entrenched in textbooks and testing rubrics, and are highly influential in…

The five-paragraph essay is a hard genre to love. Its inverted-triangle intro has enlightened us with too many "dawns" of some monolithic "man." It reduces arguments, which tend to be rather subtle creatures, to the confines of a single-sentence thesis. It confects arguments in bland triplicate structure, as if any claim could…

The author, who teaches the English Methods class in the credential program, knew from entries in students' Writer's Reader's Notebooks (Rief) that they were struggling with the articles assigned about a five-paragraph essay. Following a discussion of form-first instruction and CCSS assessments, this article provides concrete suggestions for…

The use of writing models with nonnative English speakers has received a certain amount of criticism--especially from teachers whose students copy models in their entirety or follow them too closely. The misuse of models has brought some teachers to the point where they believe that the best kind of pedagogy is to abandon writing models…

Structured Literacy (SL) approaches are often recommended for students with dyslexia and other poor decoders (e.g., International Dyslexia Association, 2017). Examples of SL approaches include the Wilson Reading System (Wilson, 1988), Orton-Gillingham (Gillingham & Stillman, 2014), the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program (Lindamood &…