Several barriers hinder students from producing clear and impactful written work. Writing assignments are often given on an individual basis, similar to homework, and without any assistance. Students in a classroom context have access to both their classmates and the teacher while they are working in groups or pairs as part of their assignments.…

This research inspects the allocation of involvement load to the evaluation component of the involvement load hypothesis, examining how three typical approaches to evaluation (cloze-exercises, sentence-writing, and composition-writing) promote word learning. The results of this research were partially consistent with the predictions of the…

The current study investigates the applications of the pinyin input system, a Chinese word processing method, for writing on Facebook in order to help CFL (Chinese as a foreign language) learners from two Irish universities to improve their handwriting in Chinese characters on paper. The data were collected from writing activities conducted over…

The purpose of the conference presentation upon which this paper is inspired was to present an innovative approach to motivate students to write in a second language during a first-year Spanish class. Usually, students comply with writing exercises that convey basic thoughts, due to constrained vocabulary and limited knowledge of grammatical…

This paper discusses a framework for designing online tasks that capitalizes on the possibilities that the Internet and the Web offer for language learning. To present such a framework, we draw from constructivist theories (Brooks and Brooks, 1993) and their application to educational technology (Newby, Stepich, Lehman and Russell, 1996; Jonassen,…