Many students enter upper grades unprepared to make decisions and take charge of their work, especially with writing assignments and organizing their thinking in any written piece. With good intention, many teachers make lots of decisions for students on organization and development a piece of writing. Gallagher and Kittle share how they let…

The Institute for Education Sciences identifies main idea and summarization instruction as effective practices for improving adolescent students' reading comprehension. Main idea generation is a higher-level comprehension skill that requires students to read the text, connect information across the paragraph or section, determine the most…

With the recent rapid technological advance, second language (L2) educators have increasingly incorporated technologies into writing pedagogy. Two of the major technologies to promote L2 writing are e-portfolios and automated written corrective feedback (AWCF). Notably, feedback-rich portfolios facilitate L2 learners' self-regulation and writing…

English language arts teacher Zachary Wright describes how he uses "Mad-Lib"-like templates to help his unconfident writers (which is most of his students) see precisely how to do things like write a thesis statement, extract examples from the text, and structure a coherent essay.

Teacher Geneviève DeBose Akinnagbe discusses her school's--and her own--improvement in the area of writing instruction. While she is a strong believer in teacher-led change, she says the change in this case was mainly the result of the school's becoming more intentional, at an organizational level, about the teaching of writing. The progress truly…

In recent years, the use of English corpora to instruct grammar in writing classes has become increasingly popular. In English for Specific Purposes classes, such a novel approach is critically important since it not only allows teachers to achieve a profound understanding of which syntactic structures should be instructed, but it also increases…

Employers of marketing graduates view good writing as a core marketing skill, but many marketing students are weak writers. The improvement of student writing should therefore be an important objective in a well-designed marketing curriculum. One-page papers combine the effective teaching of marketing concepts with writing instruction while…

This article describes a cooperative writing response initiative designed to develop writing skills in foreign/second-language contexts (hereafter L2). The strategy originated from my desire to cater for my learners' need to become better writers in English within a constrained educational environment in Argentina. In this article I describe this…

For many ESL students, the linguistic resources needed for explicit development of abstract ideas, a central tenet of academic writing, are difficult to control (Schleppegrell, 2004). Using the linguistic notion of Theme and Rheme (Halliday & Mathiessen, 2004), this piece is intended to share a way for teachers to explain differences between…

The English cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan makes great contributions to the understanding of the coherence and cohesion of the English texts. It should be applicable in the teaching of English writing so as to improve the cohesion in the students' compositions. The present paper describes a practice of this order among non-major…

The use of prose models in the English as a second language writing class has been criticized for promoting product-based rather than process-based learning. However, the process-centered approach has a number of drawbacks, and prose models can solve some of these inherent problems. Properly designed models can be an essential part of a writing…

This article profiles a group of college students with learning disabilities, outlines strategies used to help those students in their 100-level expository-writing class, and illustrates persistent writing problems with three student writing samples. This study revealed that, even with explicit support, students whose learning disabilities had an…

While teaching mechanical aspects of writing in English as a second language (ESL) to ten- and eleven-year-olds has been found to be relatively simple, the most difficult thing to teach, and the first to break down when guidance is removed, is logical information sequencing. Without guidance, most children will produce random sentences, but when…

Written words are laid out in space and exist on the page all at once, but a reader can only read a few words at a time. For readers, written words are trapped in the medium of time. So how can we best organize writing for readers? Traditional techniques of organization tend to stress the arrangement of parts in space and certain metadiscoursal…

The "cyberjournal" is a bridge between handwritten journals and word-processed essays that can be integrated into college courses to help students improve writing skills and maintain classwide discourse and multivoicedness through the Internet. Discusses the advantages of cyberjournals (class-centered, public, task-focused,…