University students can become overwhelmed and hopeless as they pursue their final capstone writing projects. They are also navigating trying times of overlapping crises such as poverty, environmental decay, and war. To address these challenges, our Capstone Writing Groups (CWG) are designed to develop students' writerly competence and enhance…

This study investigated students' perceptions of collaborative writing in a teacher-centred class and their change in beliefs about English writing through collaborative writing experiences. The analysis of multiple data sources (i.e., video recordings of collaborative writing activities, two in-depth, semi-structured interviews, one stimulated…

Wikipedia is one of the most important innovations of the Internet age and has been analysed and criticised within higher educational settings for how it is utilised by students or academics for essay assignments or research. Less work has been done on how content writing for Wikipedia may be deployed as an instructional tool and its pedagogical…

In traditional classrooms, a textbook was often the only source of knowledge available; in stark contrast, today's classrooms have an infinite number of knowledge sources available through the Internet. Nevertheless, a range of studies suggest that students systematically favor Wikipedia in their school-related literacy practices. The present…

A time-series analysis was used to investigate Arabic undergraduate students' (n = 50) perceptions of assessed group work in a major government institution of higher education in Qatar. A longitudinal mixed methods approach was employed. Likert scale questionnaires were completed over the duration of a collaborative writing event. Additionally,…

First-Year Seminars (FYS) are among the high-impact practices described by AAC&U. We studied the long-standing First-Year Seminar Program at our public research university for the ways in which writing assignments--individualized for each seminar--help faculty and students achieve program objectives in critical and analytical thinking, the…

This case study conducted by a writing specialist and a theatre specialist examines the ways in which writing to learn and learning to write took form in a course in which the ultimate goal was a staged production for a live audience. Using naturalistic methodology that deployed both ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches to analyze the…

According to Swain, Kinnear, & Steinman (2011), we use a language with others as a form of shared cognition, and in the process we scaffold each other. This action research investigates how students' online written output affects each other's writing. One thousand twenty online entries written by 21 Japanese university sophomore English majors…

For students new to higher education, the task of developing their academic writing skills, and particularly the principles and practices of source-referencing, can be daunting. Although institutions and teachers can and do provide positive guidance on this score, all too often students veer into inadvertent plagiarism through lack of confidence…

To test the feasibility of Wikipedia editing in large undergraduate psychology classrooms, we engaged groups of students in a large introductory-level Human Development course (N = 110) in editing Wikipedia articles to improve psychology-related content. Students attended in-class workshops and received online support to develop skills. They…

Even though collaborative prewriting tasks are frequently used in second language (L2) writing classes (Fernández Dobao, 2012; Storch, 2005), they have not been as widely researched as other tasks, such as collaborative writing and peer review. This article examines the effectiveness of collaborative prewriting tasks at encouraging English for…

This study explored how college freshmen at a mid-sized public university in north-eastern United States used Twitter, an anytime/anywhere writing technology, to support and promote the writing process by using tweets as a pre-writing activity. Two of the authors taught a joint course of First Year Seminar and Basic Reading in which the same group…

This article describes a model for student/faculty collaboration in WAC development--students tutoring faculty on drafts of the writing assignments they have designed for their own students. While writing center scholarship is student-centered and invites student participation, Writing Across the Curriculum scholarship and implementation remains…

This article describes a task-based writing project. High-school students in Zambia wrote a proposal to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS in their community. By writing on a topic related to their lives, students were motivated and empowered to use their English skills for positive change. The project was an interactive workshop that invited a community…

The administrative communications course at Bloomsburg University has dual goals: to improve written and oral communication skills and to improve global business communication skills. Thus an opportunity exists to create projects that require graduate students to learn about other countries and other peoples. A project--writing a business plan for…