Research has suggested that the type of feedback learners receive can impact on whether learners understand the feedback, the extent to which they engage with it, and whether they incorporate it in their revised drafts. However, to date, only a small number of studies have investigated learner engagement with corrective feedback provided by…

This paper explores the reasoning processes expert teachers use when reading and responding to elementary students' writing. We report findings from a qualitative multi-case study drawing on "think-aloud" interview data from seventeen participants as they read and responded to narrative, informational, and opinion/argumentative drafts.…

Research on gender and writing strategies in English as a foreign language (EFL) is scarce. This study investigates whether Moroccan male and female undergraduates use similar or different writing strategies when composing essays in the narrative and expository genres. Using think-aloud as a main research tool, a questionnaire, and retrospective…

This study explored how undergraduate students perceive, self-regulate, and respond to feedback from instructors on written work. The general problem was that students in college are not prepared to practice metacognitive regulation to promote learning, particularly in the context of utilizing instructor feedback on written work to improve their…

This dissertation explores seven second language (L2) undergraduates' learning experiences in a First-Year Writing (FYW) course at an American university. While the FYW course is designed from the perspective of first-language (L1) composition scholarship and focuses, broadly speaking, on analytical writing and the related development of critical…

Problem Statement: Within Language Arts instruction the use of teacher-student writing conferences is accepted as an effective strategy for teaching writing. The writing conference allows for an individual one-on-one teacher-student conversation about the students' writing or writing process and provides the student an audience in terms of…

The purpose of this study is to explore ways of incorporating web-based concordancers for the purpose of teaching English collocations. A mixed-methods design utilizing a case study strategy was employed to uncover four specific dimensions of corpus use by twenty-four students in two classroom sections of a writing course at a university in…

A three-part training procedure was developed to adapt thinking-aloud writing protocols (TAWPs) for use with children as verbal reports of their audience awareness. Four nine-year olds wrote letters while producing TAWPs. Children know that audience factors affect writers' decisions, but they do not use this awareness when making writing…

A case study examined one college student's poor performances during timed-writing sessions to develop a method to allow students to maintain the quality and ease in writing they achieve in other writing situations. The student, assigned to write a movie review, volunteered to participate in two 90 minute talk-aloud protocol sessions to examine…

A case study of writing behavior illustrates the potential rift between writers' awareness of audience perspective and their application of this knowledge. Twelve students (four each, aged 9, 13, and 18) in the San Diego, California, school system were asked by their teacher to write two letters about memorable places they had visited--one to a…

On the basis that English as a Second Language (ESL) writers encounter cross-cultural interference when dealing with the five-paragraph essay, a study was conducted to examine the writing of three ESL writers in a basic writing class. The case study of one of the subjects, a woman from Hong Kong, focused on her comments relating to the structure…

Data collected from young adult English-as-a-second-language students' (N=20) reports, think-aloud protocols, and analyses of achievement in composition writing indicated that most learners were able to use these learning strategies to make discernable achievements in their writing proficiency. (Author/CB)

A study at Purdue University (Indiana) investigated three English-as-a-Second-Language students' understanding of and attitudes toward teachers' written feedback on compositions. All were enrolled in an expository prose class for non-native speakers of English, and all were freshmen of varied ages and backgrounds. Data were gathered in videotaped…

Sentence combining is a powerful tool for structuring information and can be used effectively throughout the composing process. The teaching of composition can integrate into the composing process a number of concepts, including the use of heuristics, intellectual strategies, organizing principles, and sentence combining. A useful model for the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate ESL instructors' feedback techniques and the rationales behind these techniques, to explore ESL students' beliefs about the relative effectiveness of various types of feedback, and to compare students' beliefs with those of their instructors. A university-level ESL instructor and two of her students…