Writing achievement is a complex skill set as characterized by the sociocognitive writing framework, including writing domain knowledge (e.g., sentence structure), general cognitive skills (e.g., critical thinking) and intra- (e.g., interest) and interpersonal (e.g., collaboration) subfactors. During students' postsecondary careers, they need to…

In this article, we aim to explore the differences in the received peer feedback among successful, less successful, and unsuccessful students in higher education. This exploratory study was conducted in online settings and in the context of argumentative essay writing. In total, 135 undergraduate students participated in an online module and they…

Writing is a critical tool for developing thinking and communicating ideas. However, only about a third of students across grades 4, 8 and 12 meet standards for proficient writing (NCES, 2011). While writing generally has long been a neglected area of curricula, this is especially the case with argument writing. The proposed presentation describes…

Research suggests that learning is situated, social, and constructed. Teachers, as well as their students, learn through collaborative participation in meaningful activity. This study investigates the impact of a Writing Project Institute on teachers' learning and instruction, considering characteristics of professional learning that influenced…

In September, 2016, the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER) and the National Center for Education Research (NCER) of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) convened a group of experts to discuss and provide input on research needs in the area of middle and high school writing for students, including English learners (ELs) and…

Linguistic properties of writing prompts have been shown to influence the writing patterns contained in student essays. The majority of previous research on these prompt-based effects has focused on the lexical and syntactic properties of writing prompts and essays. The current study expands this research by investigating the effects of prompt…

In the county schools, students are assessed every nine weeks based on a writing prompt using a rubric supplied by the county, but the students are often taught using Writer's Workshop. This action research attempted to determine if Writer's Workshop and the use of writing prompts have different effects on first graders' writing ability and…

The 5th International Conference on Language, Literature and Culture has been hosted by Mehmet Akif Ersoy University (Burdur, Turkey), in cooperation with Çankaya University (Ankara, Turkey) and Süleyman Demirel University (Isparta, Turkey). Our main aim has been to provide a forum for discussion, to facilitate integration in these fields, and to…

Everything taught as rhetoric today can be traced to Aristotle, but his rhetoric needs to be updated. The five elements of his rhetoric--invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery--were designed for public orators, but rhetoric has since come to mean the written rather than the spoken word. Peter Ramus redefined rhetoric in the sixteenth…

"Frame alignment"--the conscious process of creating correspondence between one's own "frame" (ways of making meaning out circumstances) and someone else's--is a necessary condition for participation in organized social movements. Frame alignment processes may offer a generative and useful alternative to the reductive…

In most traditional introductory college composition courses students are generally advised to address the teachers or some other authoritative figure as their primary audience. To supplement this traditional approach, students should also direct their discourse to audiences who are not projected as superior critics. One paper assignment that can…

Many teachers would like to counter what Deborah Tannen calls "The Argument Culture." They recognize that teaching students traditional principles of argument may perpetuate the kind of adversarial thinking that erupts all too often: in aggressive newspaper headlines, on confrontational television shows, in court rooms, and in school…

The composition classroom has traditionally been seen as one of the most important places to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Composition theory based on developing students' rhetorical skills in argument seeks, in particular, to address development of these skills. Rhetoric is audience-based and culminates in an argument that…

Composition instruction directed at native speakers of English has focused on the composed product rather than the composing process. The teaching of English as a second language (ESL) students has had a similar emphasis, with much classroom time devoted to sentence manipulation and usage exercises. Such exercises have little effectiveness in…

One pluralistic method for teaching advanced composition reflects the approaches of two texts: Linda Flower's "Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing" and Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor's "A Rhetoric of Argument." Such an approach combines the practical tasks of arguing for consensus proposals with functional rather than…