This article presents a constructivist writing placement framework, developed from the study of two pilot iterations of a local writing placement mechanism at a large public research university. Through preliminary analysis of data from these pilots, we present a model of constructivist writing placement and demonstrate how it helps move…

Writing groups have the potential to be positive academic communities, but often become problematic spaces where students go to get their writing "fixed." In this article, the authors draw on literature from peer response groups as well as social justice pedagogies to explore how teachers might develop these groups as spaces for student…

In distance education courses with a large number of students and groups, the organization and facilitation of collaborative writing tasks are challenging. Teachers need support for planning, specification, execution, monitoring, and evaluation of collaborative writing tasks in their course. This requires a collaborative learning platform for…

Isolation is a consideration for many writers and is a term that has become synonymous with the pandemic. Perhaps this explains why the focus for much practice and research on writing development from a learning development and academic literacies context has traditionally focussed upon in-person support. Digital writing practices offer…

This paper explores the ways ESOL writing instructors implement and assess participatory writing practices in the classroom using digital technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participatory writing practices are largely sociocultural in nature and thereby resist the notion of standardized and individualized practices to focus on co-creating a…

We report on a survey of students and alumni, examining their "rhetorical training"--their writing knowledge and experiences across multiple courses, campus employment, and workplace contexts. The survey asked participants to identify their most often written genres and their most valued type of writing, the rhetorical situations in…

This essay explores the creativity and learning that can take place when students are given the opportunity to go beyond the GCSE set poems and create their own poetry anthologies. I argue that in the process of creating a poetry anthology, students are encouraged to engage on a deeper and more personal level with poetry. I suggest that when…

To motivate learners to engage in writing courses and help to improve their writing performance, a mobile-game-based collaborative prewriting approach was proposed in this study. A quasi-experiment was implemented by recruiting two classes of non-English major students from a university in northeastern China. Class 1 learned to write under the…

This paper presents a secondary analysis of data collected during an intervention study in which students learnt to synthesise pairs of texts presenting opposite views on controversial issues. The original intervention study included two treatments and examined the effects of two instruction conditions when instructional materials and tasks were…

We have developed an approach to collaborative-writing-as-inquiry that we sometimes refer to as "between the twos". Increasingly, we came to understand that the only way to continue in our process was to "write to it"; whatever the question, the query or the problem, it was this inducement--"write to it"--that led to…

Giving effective writing feedback can be a challenge for any English instructor. Teaching students how to provide peer feedback can be problematic as well. Both these challenges may seem even more apparent when teaching online during a pandemic. Using Google Docs for collaborative writing feedback is one effective method for addressing both these…

How an author communicates with a reader is a central consideration in the critical examination of any text. When considering the communication of ideas from young people whose voices are seldom heard, the journey from author to audience has particular significance. The construction of children and young people as 'authors' is important,…

Writing is a crucial means of communicating with others and thus vital to success and survival in modern society. This article provides an overview of recent research and key findings about writing, including the roles of cognitive and social processes during writing, and educational research on how to improve writing proficiency. Writing…

This article describes high school students' responses to events in the novel, "The Things They Carried," leading to their collaborative rewriting to create their own narrative versions of these events. It draws on "enactivist" theory of languaging, an approach to language that focuses on its use as social actions to enact and…

Providing students with the opportunity to generate new content and share it with a wide audience invites students to compose texts with the care and conviction that cannot be duplicated when writing solely for the teacher. This piece documents one teacher's effort to engage 99 eighth graders with an authentic writing opportunity: the…